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 cant imagine what takes so long? (what does take so long)
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.
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