3

I have bought a two Kingston USB sticks, with 8 Gb & 32 Gb I wonder if they run to slow. It seems that the biggest run faster with Ext4.

Question: Do these two USB stick run enough fast or are they broken?

Question: Why does one USB stick run much faster with Ext4, but the other does not?

Finally my opinion is that boht USB sticks are mad of a very low cost technology in comparison with USB Hard Drive or an USB SSD, but I can be wrong. I could run hdparm -I against all my hard disk and my USB hard disk, but not against both USB Sticks.

Why do I really make this question? This question comes from: Can I Install grub on an USB and make it a rescue disk?, because I wanted to know if I could make a clean installation of Ubuntu in a USB drive. Now I see that perhaps it depends on the quality of this drive.

srs@ubuntu:~$ dmesg | grep -i sdb
[    3.277465] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] 15138816 512-byte logical blocks: (7.75 GB/7.21 GiB)
[    3.279611] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
[    3.279683] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Mode Sense: 2f 00 00 00
[    3.281741] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[    3.288860]  sdb: sdb1
[    3.294503] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk
srs@ubuntu:~$ dmesg | grep -i sdc
[  175.121840] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] 60437492 512-byte logical blocks: (30.9 GB/28.8 GiB)
[  175.122604] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
[  175.122609] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 45 00 00 00
[  175.123112] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[  175.127221]  sdc: sdc1
[  175.129221] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Attached SCSI removable disk

srs@ubuntu:~$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb1       // sdb1 is a partition with 6 Gb of Fat32

/dev/sdb1:
 Timing cached reads:   23052 MB in  2.00 seconds = 11537.47 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   56 MB in  3.09 seconds =  18.11 MB/sec

srs@ubuntu:~$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb2      // sdb2 is a partition with 2 Gb of Ext4

/dev/sdb2:
 Timing cached reads:   22668 MB in  2.00 seconds = 11345.37 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   58 MB in  3.06 seconds =  18.95 MB/sec

sdb

srs@ubuntu:~$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sdc1      // sdc1 is a partition with 16 Gb of Fat32

/dev/sdc1:
 Timing cached reads:   25156 MB in  2.00 seconds = 12591.29 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   56 MB in  3.02 seconds =  18.52 MB/sec

srs@ubuntu:~$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sdc2      // sdc2 is a partition with 16 Gb of Ext2

/dev/sdc2:
 Timing cached reads:   23476 MB in  2.00 seconds = 11749.46 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  106 MB in  3.00 seconds =  35.30 MB/sec

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5
  • What is the question exactly?
    – dobey
    Aug 27, 2012 at 18:26
  • @dobey. I have updated my 3 questions.
    – Salvador
    Aug 27, 2012 at 18:38
  • 1
    When you perform a S.M.A.R.T disk benchmark, the file system is irrelevant, since it simply does not care about file systems.
    – user77111
    Aug 27, 2012 at 19:39
  • @Cumulus007 I have performed a simple benchmark, these USB sticks does not support SMART, however you are true, both benchmarks graphs come from different sticks but not from different partitions.
    – Salvador
    Aug 27, 2012 at 19:44
  • sounds like a very interesting question to me... maybe you should reformulate it to something like "can ext4 make the USB drive considerably faster?" and be much more specific.
    – cregox
    Nov 13, 2012 at 16:25

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