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?
Linux – When installing linux on USB Drive, which filesystem should I use to format for best performance
filesystemslinuxusb
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 recommandext4
because it is linux defaut and flash friendly.More info in this answer: Debian live with persistence.