NAS / JFFS/ USB and Memory Sticks Question

[BreakingDad]

So. RN I have an ancient seagate NAS drive that is plugged into a lan port direct, it works, albiet a bit slow. I also have a WD Passport Ultra 2tb USB drive, that blows away the seagate for speed over the network. In the other USB socket I have an 8gb memory stick with the JFFS stuff on it - skynet/flex/ent/swap etc

My question is this. If I were to get rid of the NAS drive completely (It is bulky and slow these days) and buy another WD Passport Ultra to use as basically an exact backup of the other drive. Would I also be able to run the stuff that is on the memory stick from the same drive? as 8GB is nothing, could it sit on the corner of the WD and still perform adequately as a swap file etc? Would it require any special set up / partitions or could I just go right over and install skynet and flex on it, along with the back up I will put on it manually ?

This would basically free up a lan socket for me, and free up a mains socket, and be neater?

Please advise.

Matt

 

[ColinTaylor]

Yes you could do that. Entware and the user add-ons (like Skynet, etc.) should really reside on a Unix-type filesystem, like ext4. I'm guessing your 2TB drive is formatted in something like NTFS in which case it would need to be re-partitioned and/or reformatted.

 

[BreakingDad]

Yes you could do that. Entware and the user add-ons (like Skynet, etc.) should really reside on a Unix-type filesystem, like ext4. I'm guessing your 2TB drive is formatted in something like NTFS in which case it would need to be re-partitioned and/or reformatted.

Good point, is it possible to have an Ext partition of say 10gb on an otherwise NTFS HD? or would I have to make the whole drive Ext

 

[ColinTaylor]

Yes you could do that. But if you're planning on being able to plug the drive into a PC at any time IIRC Windows will only see the first partition on a multi-partition disk.

 

[BreakingDad]

Yes you could do that. But if you're planning on being able to plug the drive into a PC at any time IIRC Windows will only see the first partition on a multi-partition disk.

That's fine, I will rarely plug it into a PC, it will be used simply as a backup of my movies and music. The Ext Partiton would be used for skynet / swapfile / entware and flex.

I do have a couple of questions, will it be fast enough, in comparison to an 8gb USB stick? and would it be best to allow say 20gb for the Ext partition or just keep it as 8 ?

Also I used Ext2 on my current stick, are there any benefits to using Ext4 instead of Ext2 ? I can do ether with the partion tool I have.

 

[ColinTaylor]

You said in post #1 that the 2TB drive is already connected to your router and it "blows away the seagate for speed" so presumably you already know whether it is fast enough? USB flash drives by comparison generally tend to be much slower, especially on sustained writing. But nothing in the Entware partition should really be speed sensitive.

If you don't need PC compatibility I would suggest you also use ext4 as the filesystem for the large partition (or just create one very large partition for everything). Being a native Linux filesystem it would be more reliable than using the proprietary NTFS driver.

I would strongly recommend ext4 (with journaling) over ext2. I have spent too many hours in my professional life trying to recover data from non-journaling filesystems.

If you're going to use ext4 at all I suggest that you use the router's amtm Format Disk option to partition and format the drive. That will ensure that any ext4 filesystems created are 100% compatible with the router.