mkfs.ext3 or mkfs.msdos

[James Gray]

On 09/09/2008, at 10:33 PM, Bart Silverstrim wrote:
> FAT is old, tested, and reliable for such a purpose.

It's also patented.  Personally, I like to avoid the sort of mine  
field software patents impose and therefore avoid FAT (and NTFS,  
and...) like the plague!

As for the wear levelling "controllers" in removable flash storage,  
there's far more marketing in that than real benefit.  If I had more  
time, or desire, I'd dig up some journal articles that have been  
written about flash memory life and file systems.  The results are  
rather interesting.  What it boils down to it the wear levelling is  
usually optimised for one specific file system (you guessed it, FAT)  
and other file systems (like ext2/3) really don't gain a lot from it.   
As ext2/3 writes to superblocks you find that those sectors get fried  
well before the rest of the flash media requiring you to switch to  
backup superblocks.

As always YMMV but personally, I'm still hopeful that one day we will  
get a cross-platform, non-patented flash file system that is  
lightweight, robust and fast :)  Maybe in the next life...but we can  
live in hope.

Cheers,

James
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