Linux – Which filesystem is appropriate for formatting an USB-stick and install an operation-system

I personally have installed Debian (not ubuntu) to a thumb drive before and absolutely loved it. It makes it very convenient and i wouldn't have it any other way.

I personally used ext2 as I was too worried about the writing affects of journaling that would eventually kill my stick.

I can tell you that with ext2, i have been up and running for roughly 9 months almost none stop. I haven't noticed any problems nor real slowdowns due to my usage.

The only recommendation i have is to run fsck everyweek. This should allow you to see the 'bad sectors' of the drive and it will continue to work around them. That being said, i still do not have any bad sectors and it's working like a charm.

I'd highly recommend a thumb drive linux (next i'm going to try fedora instead of debian) for anyone who travels often and doesn't want to be tied down to using what is available where you are.

Alot of people are suggesting ZFS. But ZFS is not available natively under Linux except through fuse. I wouldn't recommend this for your situation where performance is likely to be important.

Unfortunately, ZFS will never be available as a native kernel module unless licencing issues are sorted out somehow.

XFS is good, but some people have reported corruption issues and I can't really comment on that. I've played with small XFS partitions and not had these problems but not in production.

ZFS has too many advantages & useful features that cannot be ignored though. In summary they are (see ZFS Wiki for a full description of what they mean):

• Data integrity
• Storage pools
• L2ARC
• High capacity
• Copy on write
• Snapshots & clones
• Dynamic striping
• Variable block sizes
• Lightweight filesystem creation
• Cache management
• Adaptive endianness
• Deduplication
• Encrypion

So how do we get around it? My suggested alternative which may suit your situation is to consider nexenta. This is an Open Solaris kernel with GNU userland tools running on top. Having an Open Solaris kernel means having ZFS available natively.