There are a few things you can do to speed up the operation of ext3 filesystems, by changing some of the ways in which it behaves by default.

This is all for /dev/sda1, change it to suit the partition you are working with. Make sure you have an ext3 filesystem on there already, and ensure you have unmounted the filesystem first.

umount /dev/sda1
tune2fs -Ohas_journal -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sda1
tune2fs -O dir_index /dev/sda1
e2fsck -D /dev/sda1
Add ",noatime,nodiratime" to the list of options in the relevant line in /etc/fstab.
mount /dev/sda1

Tags: Linux