FAT32 vs ext2 on USB stick

[James Heather]

Does anyone have any strong views about whether one should use FAT32 or
ext[23] for the base filesystem for a bootable USB stick?

I was using FAT32, but it occurs to me that creating the USB sticks is
much quicker if it's ext2 because it supports sparse files and so the
overlay and persistent home don't need to be completely overwritten with
zeros. Creation time is now 5m rather than 15m.

Are there downsides (other than it not being readable in Windows, which
I don't care about)?

Looks like I'm not allowed ext4, because the livecd-iso-to-disk script
complains! (That's presumably a bug, since ext4 ought to work fine.) Are
there reasons to go for ext3 rather than ext2? I'm not quite sure what
the journalling achieves--the number and size of the files on the
partition isn't going to change, but obviously the data inside the
overlay and persistent home will change.

James

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 21:28:22 +0000,
  James Heather  wrote:
> Looks like I'm not allowed ext4, because the livecd-iso-to-disk script
> complains! (That's presumably a bug, since ext4 ought to work fine.) Are
> there reasons to go for ext3 rather than ext2? I'm not quite sure what
> the journalling achieves--the number and size of the files on the
> partition isn't going to change, but obviously the data inside the
> overlay and persistent home will change.

It's not hard to fix the script. I have done this for both ext4 and NTFS at
various times. (Though I think there are some limitations on NTFS support.)