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SSD File System Recommendations

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yksyks:
To 4wd: That's a nice setup idea. For the moment I'm going to stick with more or less standard setup, though, as it's not my PC.

To f0dder: I suppose when disabling the last access time timestamps improves significantly the performance of an HD, the more it should be apparent with SSD, right?

To Kamel: I don't think so. In my experience when I reformatted a bunch of old HDs, which I'm using now as external via USB, from FAT32 to NTFS, I got an increase in performace 5 to 10 times faster, both reads and writes. This might not apply to SSD, of course.

On the other hand, I prefer NTFS not only for speed, but also for those bells and whistles, like journalling, shadow copy, etc.

f0dder:
yksyks: there's probably a lot bigger speed gain to be seen from disabling last-access timestamp update on SSD than on mechanical disks. Why? It's tiny data - mechanical disks are addressed in 512-byte sectors. SSDs are organized differently... the block size is larger, and even worse you get the "erase unit size" which is multiple blocks large. When updating data on an SSD, you get a sequence like the following (doesn't take some of the more advanced latency-hiding and lifespan-improving SSD features into account)

--- ---1) read entire erase-unit-size block
2) merge modified data
3) erase block
4) write block

Would be interesting to see some benchmarks of NTFS vs. FAT, but I'm pretty convinced that
1) FAT wouldn't be faster
2) people would do the benchmarks wrong
:)

4wd:
To Kamel: I don't think so. In my experience when I reformatted a bunch of old HDs, which I'm using now as external via USB, from FAT32 to NTFS, I got an increase in performace 5 to 10 times faster, both reads and writes. This might not apply to SSD, of course.-yksyks (May 11, 2009, 03:48 AM)
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IIRC, from doing a lot of PE builds to flash drives, using FAT32 on an external USB drive isn't recommended because XP reads it slower than NTFS or FAT16.

The end result is if the drive is 2GB or smaller, use FAT16.  If it's bigger, use NTFS unless you need compatibility with another OS.

Kamel:
I know for a fact that FAT32 in many instances is of a much greater speed than NTFS... However, that would be specifically in certain environments. For instance, with slower processors etc. If hardware were not an issue, which is faster would be a good question. Theoretically, I suppose NTFS "should" be faster, but the software and hardware mix surely has to be optimal for such a thing to hold true. I am unaware of the instances when NTFS might be faster or slower, but I definitely know that FAT32 had much faster data retrieval time for me.

Having said that, you are wondering how I know. How I know would be my experience with programming lost (deleted or otherwise destroyed file tables) file recovery programs. NTFS believe it or not was simpler for us to use but FAT32 was ultimately faster. Further, the tests were over linux and windows (all of it substantially slower all together on linux).

I suspect that windows tries very hard to get NTFS accepted as a new file system standard so they may work much harder at optimizing the read speed of NTFS in the windows drivers. That's a whole different can of words, but suffice to say that I have read ~800 pages of file system forensics so my guess isn't completely uneducated. It also isn't complete truth though, as the intent of what I was doing was never to compare speeds of the 2 methods, I just happen to notice it while working on the project.

I hope that clears up my position on the subject a little better.

4wd:
While we're talking about filesystems - there's one that hasn't been mentioned yet: exFATw

As WikiPedia says: ...suited especially for flash drives...

Now I'm not sure whether they mean USB or flash drives in general but it can be read by XP (with Hotfix), Vista SP1 and Linux (free kernel module).

Implemented in Vista SP1, it's now available for XP SP2/3.

The XP driver is available from Microsoft here.

The only thing against it is that it is proprietary to Microsoft.

A search over at MSFN will show a lot of threads, mostly pertaining to USB flash drives.

EDIT: I found what seems to be the original article mentioned in MSFN forums but not referred to: Tech Recipes

The article is dated 28-Feb-2008 and I found that the paragraphs at the bottom possibly summed it up nicely:
Interestingly enough, exFAT is not used currently for formatting hard drives. It is being recommended in Flash memory storage and other external devices only. This is why it is currently not considered a huge competitor to NTFS on hard drives.

However, exFAT should be a true competitor to NTFS on systems with limited processing power and memory. NTFS on flash memory has been known to be inefficient for quite some time. exFAT’s smaller footprint/overhead makes it ideal for this purpose. Of course, only if your definition of “ideal” allows software to be proprietary and not open source.

Vista will happily read FAT, exFAT, and NTFS from flash. ReadyBoost may not work with exFAT formatted flash drives, however.

In conclusion, basically, FAT is a simple system. This limits FAT system by losing efficiency at large sizes, but allows it to run with less resources. The complexity of NTFS increases features but requires more memory and processing power.
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