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SSD File System Recommendations
f0dder:
4wd: the "especially suited for flash drives" of exFAT would be flash memory cards, not SSDs - and primarily because of things like being much simpler to implement than NTFS (digital cameras and other embedded devices are still relatively limited).
Kamel: you can't compare linux NTFS access speed to native speed... the only reliable NTFS support for linux is ntfs3g which is implemented in userland, and at least previous versions have been known to be pretty slow.
Bulk read/write of large files should be the same speed on nonfragmented FAT and NTFS drives. Lots of tiny modifications (creating small files or directories, manipulating dates/permissions etc) is where you'd be able to see a difference between FAT and NTFS - and I honestly don't know which one would have the speed advantage. NTFS needs to journal the fs metadata, which obviously takes some time, but on the other hand it uses smarter data structures, like not having to use the FAT hack of multiple fs entries for long filenames, and storing really small files directly in the MFT entries.
Iterating over the filesystem (search for files, whatever) should be faster on NTFS than FAT.
Kamel:
Kamel: you can't compare linux NTFS access speed to native speed... the only reliable NTFS support for linux is ntfs3g which is implemented in userland, and at least previous versions have been known to be pretty slow.
-f0dder (May 12, 2009, 12:46 AM)
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I am aware of this, and I did not compare speeds in linux alone. It is also important for you to understand that the drive was read from raw access, not by using a driver of any sort. (aka, no driver necessary)
yksyks:
Just to inform how I solved the issue: The problem was not with the Acer Aspire One being slow, but there were unbearable delays every now and then. The PC stopped responding for a span from 30 seconds to 3 minutes. Also, while benchmarking the SDD (using the HD Tune), the results varied from 34 MB/s to notches of 0.1 MB/s, without any apparent pattern.
I browsed many forums about this issue, as I suspected the SSD or the controller to be failing, only to realize that this is a common problem. Some people reported significant improvement when using FlashPoint driver, as 4wd pointed out (thanks again!).
So I installed the latest beta and now I have a completely different machine! The benchmarks shows now a comb-like pattern varying from 34.3 MB/s to 30.8 MB/s. There are no delays at all! Of course, the machine has not a blazing speed like "big" notebooks with real hard disks, but that had to be expected.
At the moment there's only one small drawbackâthe current version of FlashPoint doesn't support hibernation.
Besides, I didn't notice any change in speed when using NTFS instead of supplied FAT32.
I don't know how the FlashPoint works, but it works really perfect. Kudos to the developers!
f0dder:
I don't know how the FlashPoint works, but it works really perfect. Kudos to the developers!
-yksyks (June 22, 2009, 08:33 AM)
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My guess is that it uses a filter driver to catch writes going to the flash drive, and imposes a delay on the writes so it has a chance to merge several smaller writes into fewer large ones - since small random writes are what kills performance on most of the flash drives around today. If the developers are smart, they will have gathered data on the write and erase block sizes of the drive, and try to do erase-block size aligned (and sized) writes.
4wd:
My guess is that it uses a filter driver to catch writes going to the flash drive, and imposes a delay on the writes so it has a chance to merge several smaller writes into fewer large ones - since small random writes are what kills performance on most of the flash drives around today. If the developers are smart, they will have gathered data on the write and erase block sizes of the drive, and try to do erase-block size aligned (and sized) writes.-f0dder (June 22, 2009, 11:08 AM)
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Give that man a ceeeggaaarrr! :D
From the thread I posted earlier:Basically, FlashPoint translates small random writes to big sequential writes with RAM buffer to get better write performance.
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