Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

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

I recently bought a new SSD drive for my Laptop because even after upgrading everything else (except the CPU) the system was still slow and looking at the process use I could see that it was waiting for disk read/write for the most part and that was causing the slowness. Once I got the new drive, I had to move the existing OS installs from the old disk to the new one. I have three operating systems (OS) on the disk: Windows, Debian and Kali. I need the windows OS for my classes (my proctored exams have to be taken on a windows machine) and others are for my tinkering and general use computing. The disk layout on the old drive was as follows:

root@Wyrm:~# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: ST1000LM024 HN-M
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0f04ad34

Device     Boot     Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1  *         2048   1126399   1124352   549M  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda2         1126400 102402047 101275648  48.3G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3       102402048 135956479  33554432    16G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4       135956480 468862127 332905648 158.7G  5 Extended
/dev/sda5       135958528 175017985  39059458  18.6G 83 Linux
/dev/sda6       175022080 237936641  62914562    30G 83 Linux
/dev/sda7       237940736 468862127 230921392   675G 83 Linux

I partitioned the new disk as a copy of the old drive, except for the data partition which was smaller as the disk was smaller. I used dd to clone each partition on to the corresponding new partition using the following command: (where sdb was the new drive).

dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=2k

Once I copied the partitions over, all I had to do was refresh the GRUB boot loader config using the following command:

update-grub

After the config was updated, I was able to boot into Linux from both my Debian and Kali partitions on the new drive. However, that didn’t work for Windows. It gave be a screen-full of random characters like what you see when you try to open a binary file in a text editor and refused to boot. Thankfully I had not deleted the old windows partition so I was able to try a few more things, but *nothing* worked. Windows would just refuse to boot from the new drive. The only solution I found that could have potentially worked was a Paid software that supposedly allows you to clone your windows install on new disks/computers. Since I didn’t want to spend money on something I should have been able to do for free, I didn’t try it.

In the end after wasting a lot of time on this, I was tired of trying various things so just decided to reinstall windows on the new drive. It wasn’t a major loss because I didn’t have much data on Windows but I still dislike the fact that I had to do so just to put in a new drive. Imagine the hoops I would have had to jump if I wanted to move to a new computer. Actually I don’t have to imagine, I did jump thorough them when I moved my install from my old laptop to this one.

My linux install on the laptop is an exact clone of my desktop install. I used dd to create an image of my Linux install on the desktop and then wrote the image on the laptop. It worked perfectly fine at the first try. All I had to change was the hostname so that my DHCP server didn’t have a nervous breakdown but other than that everything worked without a single problem. Even the graphics drivers auto adjusted on the new machine. Imagine if we could do the same thing for a Windows install.

– Suramya