High Performance NTFS Driver - better than EXT3 for NAS

So the recent Tomato Shibby builds are using Paragon NTFS driver and the write performance is ~15% faster than ext3 file system. I tested with Asus RT-AC68U (ARM based router). Paragon has the Express version free for home user/private testing. I am wondering have anyone tried it on Kirkwood or Oxnas? Paragon NTFS Driver Please share your thoughts and results.

Result:
Asus RT-AC68U (800MHz-dual core)
NTFS Read: 34MB/s
NTFS Write: 29MB/s
EXT3 Read: 34MB/s
EXT3 Write: 25MB/s

I'd consider trying it, as the Pogoplugs I have usually have a backup USB stick in case something goes horribly wrong, but I'd also like to over-analyse this a bit, or weigh some pros and cons.

From my years on Windows I can tell you right away NTFS runs not so great stock, but starting around Windows 7 they stopped time stamping every access and that led to much higher performance, and many of us turned off Indexing, which also helped.

However I can't tell you what common Linux NTFS drivers concern themselves with regard to excessive time stamps or indexing, journaling or cluster size. A dual core 800Mhz router like you have, that's a lot of power to plow through such calculations, and 256 MB RAM is double most Pogoplugs.

So in the meantime I'd love to know how Tomato Shibby integrated the NTFS drivers in the firmware or if it's possible to Apt-get it on Debian?

Sadly, the places I could most use NTFS support are also routers with USB ports. Routers only want to see NTFS (slow) or Fat32 (under 4GB files) and that can be painfully slow. None of mine have support for Ext 3 or thereabouts.

Way past my bedtime but i can't wait to wake up!

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-= Cloud 9 =-



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/14/2016 02:01AM by JoeyPogoPlugE02.

Paragon NTFS drivers is proprietary, not open source. So I'd prefer only ntfs-3g where you can apt-get install. Tuning NTFS performance in Linux takes some works, we just need to do more researches.

For example, one such improvement for ntfs file system could be:

mount -o remount,noatime,big_writes /media/VIDEO

If your disk is labeled VIDEO, and it was aleady mounted at /media, remount it with the command above.

-bodhi
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I forgot to follow up with this post. Apparently, the free driver only work with 86 and x86-64 architectures and kernel from 2.6.36 up to 3.14.x Tomatousb use 2.6 kernel. I tried to crosspile for armel but it exits the compiler with an "unexpected" error. If I understand correctly, because Asus/Netgear default come with Tuxera/Paragon driver, they can include it in TomatoUSB. Paragon recently signed a contract with Belkin earlier this week for their driver.

In other words if we revert back to 3.14 kernel we can get proper NTFS support. If you compile the driver for 3.14 can you please upload it here?

Hey, in situations such as a stock router with a USB port (I currently have 4) that lack 3rd-party firmware support, and none recognize Ext3, would formatting NTFS cluster sizes larger (on external drive) increase read/write speeds? I wish I had a spare external hard drive to format many partitions, of varying cluster sizes and find out.

For me the focus is less on a dedicated Linux situation, as my Pogoplugs are only connected to Ext 3, but router access is very important (to me).

But, I have a 500 GB external formatted FAT32 (USB 2.0) that completely out-performs a 1TB USB 3.0 formatted NTFS. And you figure, if this were containing a Linux or Windows installation all those the tiny files would fill up 64k clusters right away. But for external storage, movies and all that, books, those are large enough files to use bigger clusters with little waste.

I'll end up testing this, because there's no substitute for real world tests, but I can't promise when.

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-= Cloud 9 =-