Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Format as ext3 - 10:10 (That's 10 minutes ten seconds)
>> Fsck as ext3   - 11:30 (No files)
> 
>> Format as NTFS (quick) - 00:14
>> chkdsk (no files)      - 00:06
> 
>   It seems that you are trying to make some kind of point or statement.

A couple weeks ago, Andrew pointed out that his ext2 format took a few 
seconds and his NTFS format took 20 minutes. I measured it on a 40G 
partition and found they each took less than 15 seconds if you didn't do 
the scan, but I remembered it taking much longer at work.

So when I got a work-sized drive at home that wasn't full of stuff I 
wanted to keep, I tried it again.

> However, that would be quite moot, unless you have to format disks on
> a daily basis, which is quite rare.

Yep, pretty much. I'm not trying to bash anything. I didn't even try the 
other Linux file systems.

>   (Btw, are you absolutely sure fsck is not performing a surface scan?)

Yes. A surface scan would take about 15 hours on this drive. (I'm 
filling it with random data right now, as I don't really trust to 
backups a drive I've never actually written to.) It's going about one 
gig per 50 seconds.

I'll also note that at work, an fsck on a file system with a lot of 
files (like, a couple million files) takes maybe 20 to 40 minutes on an 
IDE drive, as opposed to just a couple on NTFS. Clearly different 
trade-offs were made in the design of the file systems.

I'd like to find a file system I can reliably use from OSX, Windows, and 
Linux, myself. OSX can almost handle NTFS (as in, it seems to be able to 
read/write NTFS as long as you don't hit the parts that aren't 
supportable with the UNIX file system semantics), but as far as I can 
tell, NTFS still isn't safely writable from Linux? That's what google is 
telling me, at least.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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