ext2 vs ext3

[ced]

I\'m just wondering what do you think about formating a SD card to ext3.
Is it better than using ext2?

I think with ext3 , you don\'t need to use \"fsck\".

Is it suitable for flash card (CF/ SD) ?

[tumnus]

This came up on the DevNet (or maybe even ZaurusZone) forums ages ago.

I think the general opinion was ext3 was a little overkill for a PDA. The journal file can be fairly large and of course you end up slowing down writes since it has got to write to two spots on the SD every time (not for every byte though of course, just every write \'session\').

At the end of the day ext3 is just ext2 with journalling bolted on. ext3 is just as susceptable to corruption as ext2 and you still have to do a fsck after an unclean unmount. But because of the journalling the fsck is a lot quicker, although I can\'t see a fsck on even a 512MB card taking all that long.

Since ext3 is backwards compatible with ext2 I don\'t think you need to reformat your partition to try it out and someone has posted an ext3 package on ZSI.

[slocaus]

Agreed with tumnus, from what I have read it is overkill.  That said, depending on the ROM you use, Proto did state that all his ROMs support ext3 filesystem, for what it is worth.

[doseas]

IIRC, journalling isn\'t implemented in the Sharp ROMs, so ext3 is really just ext2 on these ROMs.  Proto & other ROMs may differ.

[tumnus]

?? Surely the journalling is simply part of the filesystem. In which case you only need the ext3 kernel module installing and maybe mkfs.ext3 . The kernel module at least is available from a package on ZSI and I think you can convert a ext2 filesystems to ext3 without losing any files.

[mussi]

I think that journalling on SD type devices is just overkill, and will, if journalling is implemented at the kernel level, kill the hardware much quicker because of more frequent rewrites. I prefer to have real backups.