I have two external USB HDs connected to my TonidoPlug (1) via a USB hub. One is a 1TB and the other is a 2TB, both formatted as NTFS. The 1TB has been my primary and has all of my media on it (pics, music, etc.). I've had my TP for awhile and it's a great device, but I've always been disappointed by the disk performance. So recently I decided to format the 1TB and create an ext3 FS instead.

First I backed up my data by copying everything from the 1TB to the 2TB. I had 622GB of data to transfer. I copied the files from the shell as root using rsync, inside of a screen session to ensure the copy would continue when I logged off. This transfer took almost a solid week!! I started on a Thursday and the process finally completed sometime the following Wednesday night.



Upon completing the transfer, I formatted the 1TB in the Tonido software using its recommended default of ext3. When this completed I began the reverse process of copying all of the data BACK to the original 1TB drive (now with a shiny new ext3 FS). This time around, the transfer only took 2.25 days.



Now granted, the times are fuzzy, but NTFS write performance is abysmal in Linux, or at least the 2.6.31 kernel NTFS driver used in TonidoPlug. ext3 is around 3x faster than NTFS by my (admittedly imprecise) tests.

TL;DR ext3 - 1, NTFS - 0

You need licensed drivers from Paragon or Tuxera to be able to get higher speeds for NTFS under Linux

Precisely, which is a good reason to avoid NTFS on TP drives, if possible