USB drive slow with ext3

[mschering]

Hi,

I just bought a new USB hard drive (USB 2.0, 7200rpm). Out of the box the drive was formatted FAT32. I did a speed test with hdparm:

sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb1

/dev/sdb1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 210 MB in 3.05 seconds = 68.75 MB/sec

Looks ok I thought. Then I formatted the drive with ext3 because I thought that's better when I use it with Linux only. After the format I ran hdparm again:

/dev/sdb1:
Timing buffered disk reads: 102 MB in 3.01 seconds = 33.89 MB/sec


WOW it's half the speed it had with FAT32. Why is it so much slower with ext3?

Thanks for any help.

Best regards,

Merijn Schering

[iggykoopa]

it might be because the journaling. Have you tried it with ext2 instead? or maybe xfs(still has a journal but better performance IMHO)?

[mschering]

I will try ext2. But I just can't believe ext3 is so slow...

[mschering]

I think my first test results were false. Because when I reformat the drive with fat32 it also shows 33MB/s now. All filesystems show equal results now...