Usage of 32 GB USB stick DataTraveler under Fedora

[James Wilkinson]

Joachim Backes wrote:
> I heard that such sticks are only usable if the partitions are formatted
> in fat32; formatting the partitions in ext3 or ext4 makes such
> partitions and the total stick unusable, that means, the partitions
> can't be mounted.

Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> I'm not sure who told you this, but the file system bears no significance.

Mostly right: but many sticks have firmware and hardware performance
limitations when they aren’t used with FAT32:

https://lwn.net/Articles/428584/ says

    In contrast, the more common SD cards and USB flash drives are very
    sensitive to specific access patterns and can show very high
    latencies for writes unless they are used with the preformatted
    FAT32 file layout. 

and
    
    Ideally, the drive expects all data to be written in full segments,
    which is what happens when recording a live video or storing a music
    collection on a FAT32 filesystem. 

and

    Additionally, only one segment can be open at a time; alternating
    between two segments will cause garbage collection at every access,
    slowing write speeds to a mere 33KB/s. That said, the FAT file table
    area (from 4MB to 8MB) is managed differently, enabling small writes
    to be done efficiently there. 

Hope this helps,

James.

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