I haven't dabbled with Linux much further than patching a kernel with BFS and compiling it, but I do know that there are tons of more file systems other than ext*. I've been using ext3 and ext4 for pretty much forever. I've heard a few people say they use others like XFS, but what benefits does one provide over another? Is it a matter of file sizes and transfer speeds?

Switch to FreeBSD and use ZFS

Yeah, why?

• ext2: Fast, but no journaling. (Journaling is important for data integrity during a system crash.)
• ext3: Journaled version of ext2. It's old, but quite reliable. For general use, this one's great.
• ext4: Basically ext3 + extents and delayed allocation. It still has numerous issues, even though the kernel development team considers it "stable". I tend to avoid this one because of the issues I've encountered (severe filesystem corruption, kernel panics, etc).
• reiserfs: Very fast with datasets which contain lots of small files. has a history of buggyness, but this is mostly fixed.
• reiser4: Very fast with almost all datasets, but isn't in the mainline Linux kernel. It's not unusual that a particular release is unstable. Still, I really like this filesystem, but I'm basically waiting for it to go mainline first.
• jfs: Very fast fsck, very fast when dealing with large files, decent speed with everything else. This may help.
• xfs: Billed as a "high performance journaling filesystem", but I have yet to see any "high performance" out of it at all. Even with the crazy mkfs and mount options people suggest, I've not been able to make this one fast. I'd love for someone to show me what I'm doing wrong.
• zfs: Not supported in Linux kernel space due to stupid licensing issues, but it can be used via FUSE with unnoticeably different performance compared to native use (especially with ZFS-FUSE v0.6.0 and above). This filesystem is my absolute favourite. It melds volume management with filesystem management, makes creating crazy RAID situations easy, recovers from data corruption well, supports ridiculously large filesystems and datasets, and has nice features like snapshotting and block compression. If you're allergic to using filesystems in userspace, then you can use ZFS natively in FreeBSD ("meh") or Solaris/OpenSolaris ("blech!"). I personally tried both userspace in Linux and native use in both FreeBSD and OpenSolaris. Native use of ZFS was great, but I kept running into very stupid operating system issues with both FreeBSD and OpenSolaris, which made them unusable in the long term. So I just use ZFS under FUSE/Linux now and am quite happy with it.

prophile: If you're not going to say more than you did above, then you should not answer at all. The kind of answer you gave used to be amusing, but it just comes off as a bit rude and unhelpful now, especially when it's addressing a long-time member of our forum who is in good standing.

In case you hadn't noticed, it was a link to 43-page set of slides from Sun explaining the benefits of ZFS.

We've known each other for somewhere between three and four years now, I'm sorry you still assume I'm being difficult.

Links aren't really differentiated enough from normal text in this style.

It's how you usually operate.

I entirely agree. Miah, fix it.

Not if it's something I actually find interesting!

Like OpenGL? Or Sharks?

guys, i'm running ntfs. is that bad?

If you're on a Windows box, your only real choices are NTFS and exFAT. They're not... well, I never hear anyone gushing over how amazing either file system is, take that for what you will.

(I do hear a lot of people bitching about how exFAT is another example of Microsoft being ridiculous and trying to enforce their own proprietary standards on other people - which it pretty much is, but whatever.)

-- Griffinhart

That is so bad. Your computer might melt if you're not careful.