question on formating USB Drive in Kubuntu

[James Gray]

Daniel Pittman wrote:
> "Jonathan Jesse" <jjesse at iserv.net> writes:
> 
>> Ok I am slowly moving completely over to Linux on my laptop for work
>> and need to run a bunch of Virtual Machines so I have an 120 gig USB
>> 2.0 drive that is currently formatted in NTFS.  How do delete
>> everything that is on it and format it to ext3 or a better filesystem
>> for running such a large USB drive on?
> 
> Well, pretty easily:
> 
>   sudo mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdXXX  # replace XXX with your device node

I'd caution against using a journaling file system 
(ext3/reiserfs/jfs/xfs) on a USB drive as these formats tend to require 
a bit more I/O bandwidth than their non-journaling cousins 
(ext3/vfat/etc).  When you're operating on a bandwidth-challenged bus 
(like USB) the difference between journaling and not-journaling can be 
quite noticeable.

If you REALLY need the journal, then by all means use it...but be aware 
of the overheads.

YYMV,

James