In Windows, it's very fast to format with NTFS. I have a low powered Linux machine, with little RAM. Formatting a 2TB volume to ext4 takes a long long time.
Is there anything I can do to speed up the format? I can't imagine what takes so long? (what does take so long)
Best Answer
Strict answer
Solutions like
-E lazy_itable_init
don't change the result, only speed up the process. This is what was explicitly asked yet in many cases people need more.Extra bonus
In most case you actually want some options that match your usage patterns and not only speed up filesystem creation but also allow faster usage and more usable space.
I just did a test. Even without using
-E lazy_itable_init
, the options below speed up creation time of a 2TB filesystem from 16 minutes 2 second to 1 minute 21 second (kernel 3.5.0 64bit on Intel i7 2.2GHz, 2TB disk on USB2 connection -- SATA would probably be faster).For a filesystem that will hold large files, I use this combination:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdXX -O sparse_super,large_file -m 0 -T largefile4
where
-T largefile4
picks options in/etc/mke2fs.conf
which generally contain something like:Do a
man mke2fs
for details on each of these options.Here are relevant extracts:
-m 0
only says not to reserve 5% for root, which is okay for a data (not boot/root) filesystem. 5% of a 2TB disk means 100Gb. That's a pretty significant difference.