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I'm making a custom bootable USB flash drive with a persistent partition. Formatting the partition as ext2 obviously makes the filesystem very sensitive to improper unmounting. I remember a while back that Ubuntu (and other distributions) had problems when Flash memory was formatted as ext3/4, writing data so frequently that the flash drives died very quickly.

Have these issues now been resolved? Is there any reason to not use a journaled filesystem when formatting a USB flash drive?

Pablo Bianchi
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Chinmay Kanchi
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  • I can't speak for this on a broad scale, but my 8GB Sandisk recently died. It was formatted ext4 at the time, but granted I format and flashed it a lot throughout its life (about 3 years). – travisw Feb 05 '14 at 00:15
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    To be fair, 3 years is pretty decent for a consumer-level flash drive. With the issues that I remember reading about, flash memory could be killed within days, not years. – Chinmay Kanchi Feb 05 '14 at 00:17
  • How is the duration related to the kind of filesystem? I used my first USB-Stick for more than 10 years with reiserfs without problem - it died later in the washing machine. :) But I admit, that I used it only occasionally. – user unknown Jan 10 '23 at 21:08

3 Answers3

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I use the ext4 file system and turn off journaling in USB drives and memory cards. I also set the mount option 'noatime' in /etc/fstab in an installed system. See these links:

Finally, backup the system or at least your personal data at regular intervals and whenever important data are stored!

Pablo Bianchi
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sudodus
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Even if there were I'd still journal the USB stick. There is a slim possibility that it would increase the wear on the drive, but it's not nearly as certain as the fact that if you mistakenly fail to umount the thing properly one time you will be boned. The answer is buy more drives when they wear out, not turn off the only protection the filesystem has against damage.

sean
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I think that usb drive's every cell has it's own limit number of read/write.
So journaling is not used.
solving this problem may be very difficult.

xiaodongjie
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    Journaling is always used if you use ext4. The question is how much this affects the longevity of the flash drive. – Chinmay Kanchi Feb 05 '14 at 04:47
  • A program operation followed by an erase operation constitutes a program/erase cycle. Typically NAND flash can withstand 100,000 cycles for SLC type or 10,000 for MLC type. And journaling area is fixed in small space. So journaling area can be destroyed faster than other area. – xiaodongjie Feb 05 '14 at 16:02