Linux – When installing linux on USB Drive, which filesystem should I use to format for best performance

filesystemslinuxusb

I'm planning on installing Linux on a USB drive, and I was wondering which filesystem I should use to format the drive for best performance (overall responsiveness), and life of the drive?

Best Answer

For installing GNU/Linux on USB key, you will obtain better results if you use a so-called Live with persistant partitions.

The main advantage of using a Live system is about hardware: A linux installation will configure everything for matching specific hardware. A live system will detect hardware at each boot process.

When using a live system, the FS (maybe cramfs, iso9660 or other read-only compressed fs) is embed in a whole binary file, containing a partition table. So the only thing to do is to put them in raw on the usb key.

Once this done, you could address de rest of your usb key as one or more partitions, than format them for copy-on-write persistant partitions. For this, I recommand ext4 because it is linux defaut and flash friendly.

More info in this answer: Debian live with persistence.

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