OK everyone here probably has a different answer for this. Which filesytem is better and why? I've used mostly linux native (ext2) or ext3 is one better than the other? Most people from reading these forums choose ext3. I have yet to see anyone using anything else other than those above. Let the fight begin.

it's easier to retrieve lost data from ext2 i think but i'm no expert
ext3 is a bit faster and more stable
not sure about this and i would like someone to correct me

ext 2 is old, it's quite a bit more unreliable then ext 3...and you probably have a better change on retreiving data on ext 3 then on ext 2, because you really can lose some data in ext 2, in ext 3 that is a bit more difficult

What about reiser and xfs i heard xfs is suppose to be a the best filesystem, but never really ran across it in the forums. Is anyone using it ?

ext 3 is better than ext2, here are the four main reasons: availability, data integrity, speed, and easy transition.


Availability

After an unclean system shutdown (unexpected power failure, system crash), each ext2 file system cannot be mounted until its consistency has been checked by the e2fsck program. The amount of time that the e2fsck program takes is determined primarily by the size of the file system, and for today's relatively large (many tens of gigabytes) file systems, this takes a long time. Also, the more files you have on the file system, the longer the consistency check takes. File systems that are several hundreds of gigabytes in size may take an hour or more to check. This severely limits availability.

By contrast, ext3 does not require a file system check, even after an unclean system shutdown, except for certain rare hardware failure cases (e.g. hard drive failures). This is because the data is written to disk in such a way that the file system is always consistent. The time to recover an ext3 file system after an unclean system shutdown does not depend on the size of the file system or the number of files; rather, it depends on the size of the "journal" used to maintain consistency. The default journal size takes about a second to recover (depending on the speed of the hardware).


Data Integrity

Using the ext3 file system can provide stronger guarantees about data integrity in case of an unclean system shutdown. You choose the type and level of protection that your data receives. You can choose to keep the file system consistent, but allow for damage to data on the file system in the case of unclean system shutdown; this can give a modest speed up under some but not all circumstances. Alternatively, you can choose to ensure that the data is consistent with the state of the file system; this means that you will never see garbage data in recently-written files after a crash. The safe choice, keeping the data consistent with the state of the file system, is the default.


Speed

Despite writing some data more than once, ext3 is often faster (higher throughput) than ext2 because ext3's journaling optimizes hard drive head motion. You can choose from three journaling modes to optimize speed, optionally choosing to trade off some data integrity.


Easy Transition

It is easy to change from ext2 to ext3 and gain the benefits of a robust journaling file system, without reformatting. That's right, there is no need to do a long, tedious, and error-prone backup-reformat-restore operation in order to experience the advantages of ext3.

The above points apply to all journaling file systems.

What I'd like to know is what's the difference between them?

What makes ext3 different from xfs or reiser?