Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users and developers of hardware and software for Raspberry Pi. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I'm using a RPi B+ with XBian and transmission, and an external USB 2TB disk, which has an external power supply.
That disk is NTFS, and I've noticed that the CPU usage of the mount-ntfs process is really high..
What can I do to improve this situation, short of using ext4 that would impede the usage of that disk on other non-Linux systems?
There's a kernel driver; Xbian's mount-ntfs is presumably a user space one, but the former is a different implementation. I would guess it will consume less resources when you are not actually doing anything with the partition.
However, it may not be available on Xbian. Unmount the drive and try instead:
mount -i -t ntfs /path/to/partition /mount/point
This should avoid invoking the userspace driver because of -i ("-i, --internal-only: Don't call the [userspace] helper even if it exists <- man mount). If you don't get any errors, check ps -A | grep mount. There should not be any such process running; it will exit right away having invoked the kernel driver if present.
If there is such a process, it's probably the same thing as mount-ntfs. If not, the partition should be mounted and available.
-i option to mount to ensure kernel space driver is used and not fuse. Although IIRC it has some limitations.
Add -o big_writes to your mount commmand or big_writes to /etc/fstab
So the mount command above would become:
mount -i -t ntfs -o big_writes /path/to/partition /mount/point
