Thumb drive ext2 slow write speed

[Nils Kassube]

Nigel Ridley wrote:
> I just got a new SanDisk 2GB cruzer micro and formatted it to ext2
> (using qtparted). I then proceeded to copy just under 600MB of data ---
> it took more than 10 minutes!

10 min. would be 1MB/s write speed. What is the rated write speed of that 
device? I think 1MB/s is nothing unusual for a cheap flash disk. My FAT32 
formatted (no-name) USB stick would take about 7 minutes write time for a 
600MB file - that would be a similar (yes, I know waiting >3 more minutes 
is an eternity :) speed to yours.

> What's going on? Is it because of ext2? 
> Should I reformat it as ext3?

I don't think ext3 would help. With ext3 you have additional writes for 
the journal, i.e it would be even slower.

> This is on a Dell Inspiron 1525 (with USB 2).

The limit is the low write speed of the flash devices, not the USB speed.


Nils