Hey everyone, So I have this USB pen drive from Kingston that I've installed Linux on. These days with wear leveling, do I need to be worried about journalling and it killing my drive prematurely? Some people say they disable journalling at the expense of data integrity (if you don't unmount clean all the time or something), but maybe the 'cost' of journalling is worth it, since wear leveling and the life of your USB drive will be longer than any amount of damage journalling could do? Any computer experts here want to weigh in on this?
I run Linux on all my computers and servers except one Trenton_net. My advice, keep the journaling. Buy another usb stick and dd the stick you use normally to the new (backup) one. This way if there is ever an issue you can just slap in the backup usb stick. You can disable the journaling if you like. http://fenidik.blogspot.com/2010/03/ext4-disable-journal.html I mean, usb sticks are what $10-30 depending on size? Lots of info out there on dd http://serverfault.com/questions/141283/how-to-clone-a-usb-flash-drive-using-dd
Don't worry about it. Most likely scenario, you'll buy a new stick because this one's become too small before it wears out, unless you generate enough data to completely overwrite the whole stick every 1-2 days.
Ah I see. Do you guys think that disabling Journaling would increase performance by a significant amount on a USB pen drive (3.0)? I assume the benefits I would receive would be marginal?
USB 3.0 is 5Gbit. Is your thumb drive really a USB 3.0 device? Anyway, it is 5Gbit, nearly as fast as SATA II. If your device is really that fast, I doubt that you would notice a difference between your USB disk and an internal HDD. Filesystems are usually designed to have minimal overhead. I wouldn't think that journaling would cause that much of a performance impact, that it would be a cause of concern.
As sp said, the difference is minimal. But why not do your own measurements? You can freely toggle journalling on existing partitions. If you really need performance: The bottleneck is flash access, so go with an external SSD instead of a (physically) tiny thumb drive = more flash chips to access in parallel = moar fastar.
