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)
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.
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:
inode_ratio = 4194304
blocksize = -1
Do a man mke2fs for details on each of these options.
Here are relevant extracts:
sparse_super
Create a filesystem with fewer superblock backup copies (saves space on large filesystems).
large_file
Filesystem can contain files that are greater than 2GB. (Modern kernels set this feature automatically
when a file > 2GB is created.)
-i bytes-per-inode
Specify the bytes/inode ratio. mke2fs creates an inode for every bytes-per-inode bytes of space on the disk. The
larger the bytes-per-inode ratio, the fewer inodes will be created. This value generally shouldn't be smaller than
the blocksize of the filesystem, since in that case more inodes would be made than can ever be used. Be warned that
it is not possible to expand the number of inodes on a filesystem after it is created, so be careful deciding the
correct value for this parameter.
-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.
inode_ratio = x means that if the average file size on the volume is less than x bytes, then you're headed towards running out of inodes before running out of storage space. In that scenario you may waste literally thousands more than you expected to save.
Nov 4, 2016 at 9:13
-T huge which does inode_ratio = 65536. If in doubt, just don't set -i or -T and let the wise people who made ext2/3/4 choose for you. You'll reserve a known small part of space for housekeeping and (unless you store millions of very small files) you are guaranteed to not waste an arbitrary percentage of actual storage space. As people write, fancy software is nice, but a good filesystem must be boring and just work.
Nov 4, 2016 at 9:16
mkfs.ext4 is more faster (time: real 0m16.001s) than mkfs.ext3 (time: real 2m10.336s).
Add the flag -E lazy_itable_init
Here's what the man page says:
If enabled and the uninit_bg feature is enabled, the inode table will not be fully initialized by mke2fs. This speeds up filesystem initialization noticeably, but it requires the kernel to finish initializing the filesystem in the background when the filesystem is first mounted. If the option value is omitted, it defaults to 1 to enable lazy inode table initialization.
The default is a quick format; setting up the structures for a ext* volume takes much longer than for a NTFS volume, since there's more of them. You can reduce the number of superblocks, but even that only goes so far.
If you'll be storing mostly larger files you can increase the number of bytes per inode, thus decreasing the number of inodes created. This can substantially speed up creation time.
