USB flash drive notes

Writing repeatedly to a small number of journal blocks instead of all over the disk may prematurely "wear out" the storage device.

A journaling filesystem with its journal disabled may be a good choice. JFS and reiserfs seem to have options to do this. ext2 is definitely not journaled, so I'm creating filesystems like so:

mkfs.ext2 -b 1024 -T ext2 -i 8192 -O dir_index,filetype,resize_inode,sparse_super /dev/vg00/usr

Explanation:

-b 1024

specifies a one Kibyte block size

-T ext2

marks this as a ext2 filesystem. No journal, no extents, no cool 2005 and newer stuff.

-i 8192

says to create one inode for every 8192 block of filesystem space. It would be great if ext2 would dynamically create inodes like JFS or reiserfs do, but it doesn't.

-O dir_index,filetype,resize_inode,sparse_super

turn on indexed directories, filetypes in dirents, filesystem resizing support, and the creation of fewer than normal superblock copies

/dev/vg00/usr

this is the device special file where the filesystem will be created