Cygwin on a mobile drive: formatting options?

Fergus fergus@bonhard.uklinux.net
Mon Jan 5 09:31:00 GMT 2009


Rather than install and maintain Cygwin on several desktop machines that 
I use, I travel from one to another with one copy of Cygwin on a mobile 
drive. This is formatted FAT32 as I don't need the grief NTFS provides 
for file access and attribution. A 40G drive is glacier-shift slow, a 
100G drive was lightning, and the latest 500G drive is slow. All 3 are 
formatted using Linux fdisk + mkdosfs, as this is so reliable. To my 
surprise all 3 drives allow the user to select either FAT32 (option "b" 
in fdisk) or FAT32(LBA) (option "c"). ["Surprise" because naively I 
thought LBA was an engineering option restricted to large capacity 
magnetic drives only, and not solid state flash drives like the 40G.]
Question: Can anybody tell me whether "b" or "c" is better for access 
speed or offers any perceptible advantage over the other?
I don't mind being told to pursue this thread on cygwin-talk [but it is 
not intended to be "funny", apparently a requirement of that list] or 
being told that it is off-topic, in which case where should it be pursued?
Thank you.
Fergus


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