Guy's Random Support

I had an interesting experience with Linux filesystem performace today. I had a USB drive that I was using to backup about 45 gig of data. The drive had previously been formatted NTFS and since Linux recognized it I tried to use it for the backup drive. It did work just fine. I know USB isn’t the perfect interface for this kind of test, but it is what I have. Later in the day I decided to reformat the drive and rerun the same backup with no other changes. Here is the result. I was pretty surprised at the difference!

NTFS: 2-3MBps
EXT3: 6-7MBps