Popular File systems under Linux

I have been doing a lot of reading about File Systems, and trying to decide which one I will go with. I am thinking about going with the ext3, but I keep hearing reports saying it's the slowest. How slow is it compared to the other popular file systems?

 

Don't believe everything you hear EXT3 is quite good for most purposes, and EXT4 is just now arriving with the latest releases. I'm pretty sure Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04, due out in April) will use EXT4 as it's default filesystem and all benchmarks that I've seen show that it's awesome.

 

I use ext3 as well and have for a few years, seems good to me. Like Pitabred said, all the reports I have read about ext4 make it look pretty exciting. They are mentioning large noticeable speed increases. Don't know how stable it is though. I think I will stick with ext3 for some more time till ext4 becomes mature. My main objective is not to lose any data...

 

The new Fedora release, 11, will have Ext4 as the standard fs, Ubuntu 9.10 will offer it as an option according to this Ubuntu Jaunty alpha4 page.

 

I use ext3 and jfs. I like both

 

ReiserFS for me. It seems to deliver noticeably faster performance than ext3, but it has to run a file system check on every boot.

 

How long does that usually take? Do you ever have to reboot to refresh it?

 

It usually takes about 45s to a minute to scan the filesystem for errors on every boot... and it only does the scan when plugged in. I don't have to reboot the system to refresh it.

 

How would SSD affect if I ran ext*, would it be worth it? Or would Raid 0 be worth looking into?
As well one more question *ducks* If I run a ext drive could I still hook up NTFS external hard drives to do back ups of my computer on?

 

Yes, linux NTFS support is stable, and it doesn't matter whether it's ext*, xfs, or any other fs that's in kernel. Just make sure you have the latest version of ntfs-3g, which you should already have anyways.

I just switched my filesystem completely to ext4 except for my storage/backup volume. It's seems solid so far. I might do benchmarks.

 

How do you find the speed of ext4? Does it feel faster than ext3?

 

Yes, it does, but not by much; although, as with all computer-related things, YMMV. It feels faster, but that might just be me. After 3 hours spent getting my Arch back to where I want it, I'm expecting a reward. But even if ext4 is not very much faster, the new features are definitely worth it.

I haven't benchmarked it for speed, and I probably won't. I did test it for stability, though. There was some reports going around the last few months about ext4's causing torrents to be corrupted. That bug is now gone. Torrents work perfectly.

I'm about to commit my storage volumes to ext4. The upcoming online defragmentation functions will be nice, especially for /var/log.

 

I'm not a huge fan of ReiserFS. It's fast, sure, but I've lost data to the screwed up fsck and I'm not really willing to keep using it when it's going unsupported due to the creator/maintainer being an incarcerated murderer and all.

 

I have read others over at justlinux.com say the say thing. Some have lost data using ReiserFS.

Pitabred - Nobody is willing/able to pickup ReiserFS and run with it after Hans?

 

Reiser4 is supposed to be good, but people are waiting for btrfs, which is supposed to be the same but better.

 

I use JFS and XFS mainly, sometimes reiserfs. I really like JFS because the file system check is really really really fast compared to all other FSes, it's supposed to have less CPU usage too but I dunno about that . XFS is supposed to be good with big files so I use it on my storage drives (usually 100-300MB files).

 

I have been running reiserFS for about 8 months now with no data integrity problems... it seems like a stable FS to me... the only thing is that, with ReiserFS, the HD makes considerably more noise; when it is reading/writing intensively, it sounds like someone desperately writing an exam or something. It doesn't really bother me though.

 

Lol - "Someone desperately writing an exam". Been there before...

In all seriousness though, I used ReiserFS way back when it was new and I think I might have used it on Slackware or SUSE, but I don't remember which one. Whatever distro I used it on, the distro was choosing it was the default for the filesystem type for creation(as if to indicate it was the latest and greatest and should be used by most).

Here is the thread I was talking about where people are talking about different filesystems and some people are complaining about ReiserFS.

 

ext3.

Thats the only one it would let me use...

 

You need to choose the "Install Linux" option from the boot menu for extra filesystems, not the LiveCD desktop environment.

 

I use ext4 on my PC, haven't had any problems with it and seem to be getting better read/write performance than ext3.