NTFS has long been a nemesis of Linux. I remember in the 2000’s getting NTFS working on linux required so much effort and config changes that I stopped using it on my systems as FAT32 was more than sufficient for my needs at that time. Initially the driver was very unstable and it was recommended that you only use it for Read operations rather than Read/Write as there was a high probability of data corruption. That has changed over the years and the driver is stable. However, there is a massive performance hit when using NTFS vs ext4 on a Linux machine and I saw this when I tried using a NTFS partition on my laptop instead of ext4.
I have a 1 TB drive on my laptop along with a SSD. I dual boot the laptop (need it for my classes) between Windows & Debian and wanted to have all my files available on both OS’s. When I last tried this, ext support on Windows was not that great (and I didn’t feel like searching for options) so I decided to format the drive to NTFS so that I would have access to the files on both OS. The formatting took ages and once the drive was ready I was able to copy my files from the desktop to the laptop. While the files were being copied I noticed very high CPU usage on the laptop and the UI was lagging randomly. Since I was busy with other stuff I let it be and ignored it.
Yesterday I was trying to move files around on the laptop so that the root partition had enough space to do an upgrade and I again noticed that file copy and most of the disk operations were taking way longer than I expected. For example there would be a second of delay when I tried listing the directory when it had a lot of files. So, I decided to test it out. My data on the Laptop is an exact copy of the files on the Desktop. I timed the commands on the desktop with the same command on the laptop and there was a significant difference.
My desktop is obviously a lot more powerful than the laptop so I decided to try an experiment where I would run a command on the NTFS drive, then format the drive to ext4 and run the same command. (after copying all the files back). When I did this I saw that there was a massive difference in the time it took to run the command. On ext4 the command took less than 1 second (0.107s) whereas it took almost 34 seconds (33.997s) on NTFS parition. The screenshot for both commands are below:
du -hs command on a ext4 partition
du -hs command on a NTFS partition
That’s a ridiculous amount of difference between the two. So I obviously have to switch back to ext4 which brought us back in a full circle – I still needed to be able to access my files from Windows as well as from Linux. Decided to go a search on the Internet for options and found out that Windows 10 now lets you mount Linux ext4 filesystems in WSL 2. I haven’t tried it yet but I will test over the next few days once I am done with some of my assignments. If there is something interesting I will blog about it in the near future.
As of now, I am back to using ext4 on the laptop and the OS performance is a lot better.
Well this all for now. Will post more later.
– Suramya