[arch-general] Hacking into HAL's mount process

[Ray Rashif]

Anyway, a slightly off-topic complaint I have is that my 32GB Cruzer
is slow as hell to write to at just a measly 3MB/s. Sheesh. I wonder
if it's the size and technical limitation or whether there might be
some untested hackery.

I was thinking of formatting it in Windows and changing the allocation
unit to 64K, but I recall it only helped in reads. It was only
formatted a number of times before on Linux. First to get rid of
whatever plug-and-play firmware/software bundle it came with, and then
to play around with the best partitioning scheme, after which I just
had to abandon the idea because Windows didn't want to be friendly
with the main partition and Macs just plain ignored the drive
entirely.

A layman benchmark with two other similar smaller-sized drives, and
switching between fat16 and 32, provides a hypothesis that > size == <
speed && > fat16 == < speed. A friend has even tried exFat but (1)
Linux has only experimental read support for that and (2) its speed is
as worse as the worst I am used to.