Wow, ex4 was horrible at writing.
I took a 1.06GB TV episode and copied it from my NTFS USB drive to the Vero’s 16GB internal memory at 38MB/s.
I then took that file and moved it to a different USB drive that I wiped clean and formatted as NTFS at 35MB/s.
No too shabby for USB2.0 and NTFS.
I then moved that file from that NTFS USB drive back to the Vero’s 16GB of internal mameroy at 36MB/s.
I then formatted that USB drive as ex4 and moved that same file from the VEro to the ex4 USB at 9MB/s… OUCH!
That can’t be right?
So I moved it from the ex4 USB drive back to the Vero at 36MB/s.
So let’s try that writing to ex4 USB drive things again because those last results don’t make any sense, wait… again with the same results at 9MB/s.
I wouldn’t take my test results as anything conclusive because I find it hard to believe ex4 write performance was only 9MB/s.
There has to be something wrong going on so I say those ex4 write results are trash.
But the NTFS read and writes looked at about exactly what I would expect from USB2.0.
That same drive on a USB3.0 port on my laptop runs 170+MB/s.
So I would say that my test show that the bottle neck for a single file transfer is limitted by the USB2.0 port and not the file system.
Now, I/O performance, CPU utilization, and all that other stuff is probably much better with ex4 so if you are running a torrent daemon on the Vero, then yeah, it might make a difference… BUT… neither file system should impact your ability to playback a video without stuttering and USB2.0 is more than sufficient to handle current bitrates as well.
So the decision to use one file system over the other would primarily be decided on how you manage your files.
In my case, I bring files from my Laptop to the Vero’s USB mounted drives.
In this situation, transfer speeds over the gigabit network to the USB2.0 port max out at around 38MB/s.
So with NTFS, I can just unplug the HDD and plug it in to my Windows laptop and transfer files at 170+MB/s (that’s faster than gigabit by the way which theoretically maxes out at 128MB/s).
If the Vero had USB3.0 ports and I could get around 120MB/s over the gigabit network, I’d probably format my drives as ex4 and leave them put on the Vero and manage them remotely.
If you use a NAS or a USB drive with Vero managing torrents, then do what makes best sense for you.
BUT THERE IS NO WAY IN HELL NTFS IS TO BLAME FOR STUTTERING VIDEOS.
/end rant
