Which sort of "filesystem" for SD-Cards do you recommend ?


MrBazil2k

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Apr 27, 2012
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Ello there,

This might be a noobish question, BUT :

I m just curious which sort of filesystem is best to use with SupperZaxxon 1.52 ?

Do I have any choice ? (ext2 ? ext3 ? ntfs ? fat32 ?)

Right at the moment I am using Fat32 for both of my 64 Gb SD-Cards.

I did not have any problems with that filesystem yet.

But are there any known positive or negative side-effects with the different filesystems and SD-Cards ?

Thanks !
 
I use NTFS for my second card (64gb - where all the juicy stuff lives) but only so I could copy PNDs to it from the pc andcard reader as my wifi is (and was always) broken. Otherwise I'd have stuck ext3 on probably.
 
Booting from SD (including for flashing the firmware) requires fat, so using non-fat filesystems on your SD cards is a guarantee that you'll have to use an alternate card (or temporarily redo one) in the event you need to.



Otherwise, ext4 appears to operate perfectly fine with the two 32GB Mushkin cards I have. I originally set them up without journals, to save flash writes; but since the 1.5x firmware doesn't bother running fsck on dirty filesystems prior to mounting them, I often had to do so manually. So now they have journals.
 
i think you can boot from ext2 (i am)..ext2 was also faster than ext3 when i tested it (no journal) (edit: i am not sure about ext4 speed; main reason not to use ext4 is that it does not boot)
 
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Humm... thank you all for your replies so far.

Is there any difference about the reliability and speed of the different filesystems ?

Lets say compared to Fat32 ?

EDIT : Im wondering if somebody did any tests about this topic yet.
 
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I use fat32 because it mounts on my windows laptop... but technically.. ext2/3/4 will work... we can ask notaz to compile in F2FS soon too ;)
 
I'll have to try booting from ext2 again; the last time I tried, it would only accept the fat32 card. Of course, it also provides no feedback as to why it won't boot from SD, so it could very well be that I didn't have the correct magic thereupon.


Anyways, with any reasonably performant SD card, I suspect the real bottleneck is likely to be the SD interface, as opposed to the filesystems. I'm going to try to build a copy of bonnie++, though, just to see.
 
Don't know about ext*, but the performance differences between Fat32 and NTFS are so subtle that you won't notice any differences (except you have a directory with several thousand entries that you want to browse on a regular basis, if so NTFS would be the way to go).

I prefer FAT32 as it provides the most compatibilty - nearly every computer can cope with the FAT32 filesystem. Thats (not exactly, but not far from it) the same for NTFS, but there is the small possibility that a "chicken and egg" situation arises that you need the codec pack installed in order to read the card, but you can't install it without a readable card.
 
Thx for all the replies =D

I guess Im going to stick with Fat32 for now then.

Due to the point of compatibility.

And since I m not experiencing any corrupt data or data loss with the 64 Gb SD Cards everything is fine.
 
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I've tested many filesystems in real life. The best i've ever used is ReiserFS v3.

The only downside is an annoying bug when using a virtual machine image formatted with ReiserFS v3, and stored on a ReiserFS v3 partition: the real partition will be badly corrupted when a check will occur.

The right choice is to use it for /usr, which is not a storage folder, and also not writable to users.

Also, this is clearly the best FS for hosting virtual machine images (isn't it ironic ?). It kicks ALL other FS in the ass. For example, XFS is something like 20X slower. Did the benchs myself.

Now i mainly use Ext4 because it's good for all usages, and pretty solid. I keep ReiserFS for special purposes i mentioned.
 
Slightly OT: Does anybody know why I can't flash my Pandora from an sd card which has two partitions, the first is fat, the second is ext4?
 
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