I'm considering using my 4 GB Kingston DataTraveler USB stick to store my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles for my laptop and desktop PCs.
I want to maximize performance when using Firefox. The question is: what is the best file system and allocation size for the fastest Firefox profile operation on a USB flash drive?
I'm using Windows 7 on both machines and I don't care about compatibility or the drive's lifetime. I just want to maximize performance. I could even use ext2 with the Ext2 IFS driver if that means it'll be faster.
I'm assuming (perhaps I'm wrong) that putting a Firefox profile on a USB stick would be a "lots of small files" usage. In that case, it seems that NTFS would perform best, but I'm not sure. Besides I found nothing regarding the best allocation size to use. Considering that the default allocation size is designed for hard drives (which have different characteristics), I'm assuming that the default allocation size is not the best.
Best Answer
I personally experience more speed with NTFS (than FAT32) on my 8 GB USB stick (and yes, I use NTFS-3G on Linux, and the ntfs-stuff from MacFuse as well as Windows). But you could just format the stick either way and benchmark with this.
FAT32:
And NTFS:
Result: just minimal more speed with NTFS (Windows 7), I experienced a bit more speed on Windows XP with NTFS. anyway, benchmark it yourself.