Hello everybody
I have a huge archive , about 1,2 GB size with about 10000 files, currently in a flash drive formatted to FAT32. After experimenting, I found that formatting of the drive to EXT3 or EXT4 speeds up my drive significantly but have also found scattered warnings about fast wear of the flash drives when formatted to journalizes systems as EXT3-4 or NTFS. Yet, others report that with contemporary flash drives there is no such problem and that they have lifetime warranties.
So, any suggestions?
Thanks

Yes you can format it ext3 or ext4 no problem. I've always formatted my USB flash drives as such but be aware that you great limit the convenience of using your drive cross platform (Windows mostly) for the sake of performance.

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Thanks for your reply .I dont use windows anymore, yet I tried to "share" my archive with a winXP PC via samba while formatted in ext4 and I could read my archive without problems.
Would ext3 be safer than ext4? From what I know ext4 main advantage is better allocation and less fragmentation ( which is not imporant for me since my flash is 8GB)
Regarding safety ext4 does checksuming allowing for better reliability which I find very important but delayed allocation frightens me somewhat. I always have backup via rsync but what if, say, I change one of my files and then system crashes? how delayed is delayed allocation namely what is the expected time for the data (not the metadata) to be written in ext4 systems?
And if I rsync my archive wont the corrupted file overwrite the one in my backup ?