Allocating cache file on NTFS and FAT32
By fehmi | December 27th, 2008 | 5:25 am
It took several minutes to allocate the cache file (4 gigs) on my flash drive, OCZ ATV 4 GB, when it was formatted using FAT32 file system but the building cache process was fairly faster. When the change log for build 482 stated faster speed for building cache, I removed the previous cache file and rebuilt it. I didn’t notice any speed increase but then I decided to format it in NTFS.
Allocating the cache file is blazingly fast on the NTFS formatted flash drive, I only see the cache allocation window for a few seconds. I removed the cache file once again and then rebooted but the allocating cache process is still fast! Is this a limitation of FAT32 file system? I doubt it is a placebo effect.
Dec 27, 2008
That’s odd, so you formatted your flash drive as NTFS? What advantages does that give? Should I do the same? lol
Dec 27, 2008
My cache file is 1gb on my flash, I could do more, its a 4gb drive. But I know that FAT32 is faster than NTFS on “smaller” drives, at what point is a drive not “small”? Thanks!
Dec 27, 2008
@fehmi: I noticed the same thing when I formatted my SD-Card under NTFS as opposed to when I used FAT32, blazing fast cache file allocation, but build cache was more or less the same on both NTFS and FAT32.
I’m currently using NTFS on my cache device now, no real benefits at this point, but if you were to allocate a larger cache file which is more than 4GB, then you need NTFS, and it is faster at locating files because of its B-Tree architecture, however I am assuming that has no performance gain in this case since eBoostr allocates one large cache file, so this benefit of NTFS most probably has no performance gain.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong.
Dec 29, 2008
Moonie, you are absolutely correct.
fehmi, fast allocation on NTFS is not a limitation of FAT32–it’s an advantage of NTFS :) It does not “actually” create a file–it just makes some markups in the file table.
And finally, none of our tests showed any performance difference in FAT32 and NTFS with eBoostr.
Dec 30, 2008
Thank you for the feedback!