Is copying to ext4 faster than copying to ntfs, because I was making new containers today on ext4 speed was 45Mb on ntfs same container size speed 14Mb, both containers where madden from ubuntu with truecrypt 7.0, Is there Difference in coping speed between ext4 and ntfs, or ubuntu handle copying to ntfs slower?
2 Answers
Ubuntu made copying to NTFS slower
NTFS is implemented in Linux using a non native driver. One would expect it is not faster than a native implementation. Its not that we made it this way, its just the way it is.
Think the question should be: Is copying using Ubuntu's ntfs-3g driver slower than when you do it with other distros? The answer should, and within specs will be, no.
NTFS in Ubuntu is implemented using FUSE (Filesystem In Userspace, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace). Thus file I/O and metadata has to transfer to and fro between kernel and userspace which can create context switching and will consume more CPU than a native kernel based file system. Some anecdotal evidence shows that NTFS using FUSE is similar in performance to other FUSE based file systems (such as ZFS) and there are reports that FUSE based NTFS consumes more CPU than the Windows equivalent.