Re: ext2 on flash memory

alan
2007-06-11T15:26:00Z

On Mon, 11 Jun 2007, DervishD wrote:

> Hi all :)
>
> I was wondering: is there any reason not to use ext2 on an USB
> pendrive? Really my question is not only about USB pendrives, but any
> device whose storage is flash based. Let's assume that the device has a
> good quality flash memory with wear leveling and the like...
>
> Thanks a lot in advance :)

It depends...

Do you need to use OSes other than Linux? FAT16/32 seems to be a pretty
universal filesystem at this point. You can mount ext2 on Windows, but it
is a pain. Not certain what it takes to mount it on OS X.

I have encountered flash drives that do not format well for anything other
than FAT16, but they were old and small. Hopefully that problem no longer
exists with modern hardware. I would format it then test the hell out of
it before trusting it with important data.

--
"ANSI C says access to the padding fields of a struct is undefined.
ANSI C also says that struct assignment is a memcpy. Therefore struct
assignment in ANSI C is a violation of ANSI C..."
- Alan Cox