What is the best file system and allocation size for a USB flash drive?

Posted by e-t172 on Super User See other posts from Super User or by e-t172
Published on 2009-09-19T12:42:36Z Indexed on 2010/04/13 12:33 UTC
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Filed under:

usb-flash-drive

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filesystems

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firefox

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thunderbird

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.

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