hello guys

i am a new user in Linux os and i was using windows before.

now i want to format my hard disk again .
what is the best file system? .. i was using FAT & NTFS

is EXT3 is better than FAT & NTFS ? and what is the difference ?

please advise me ?


thanx alot

There are many native linux filesystems, ext2, ext3, reiserfs, jfs, xfs and more. You will want to install linux on a native filesystem. ext3 is good for general use and is the default for many distributions. Check out wikipedia for all the different types of filesystems.

Here are some benchmarks:
http://linuxgazette.net/122/piszcz.html
http://www.t2-project.org/zine/1/

FAT and NTFS are quite crappy in comparison. As benchmarks of NTFS filesystem are illegal ... we can't really say how crappy it is, but it is crappy.

FAT is mostly used to transfer data between systems, like on USB flash media (pendrives). Other than that it is an ancient and rather crappy filesystem, in comparison.

My recommendations are JFS and XFS, these seem to be the best performing filesystems I've found. Use ext2 if you want a non-journaled filesystem.

thank u for replying , but i mean file system for storing data .

i use now ext3 for the system ...

thanx

thank u

the question now is JFS and XFS is readable by windows ? because all my friends have windows and i may want to transfer data between .. is it possible ?

thanx again

What's that about?? Are you saying that it is illegal to measure the performance of NTFS?

For OP;
Unless you have a reason, stick with EXT3. I use EXT# for everything (except Window OS and apps) I access data partition from Windows using the ext2fsd driver.

thanx

but what about JFS . all comparisons show that it is better than ext3.

what is ur opinion?

Well, not really, here are some benchmarks including NTFS:
http://linuxhelp.150m.com/resources/fs-benchmarks.htm

But I don't think you can actually boot off of NTFS or read and write data reliably anyway.

Hi,

Check out 'Comparison of file systems'.

This link and others are available from 'Slackware-Links' .

There have been several threads on this subject here before. To summarise:
For almost every filesystem there is something that it does beter than the others, so it depends.
The first decision that you have to make is whether you want a journalling filesystem (some protection of your data in case of things going wrong, against none). (The unprotected system also has to do slightly longwinded filesystem checks every so often on startup - for some that's the killer).

Don't want protection? Well, that would often be the wrong decision, but that makes the choice easy - ext2.

Do want the protection - then your choice is Ext3, (Ext4), Reiser, (Reiser 4), JFS, XFS, although many distros only offer a subset of that choice. Most distros consider the ones in brackets are too bleeding edge for general use, so we'll just go with that and eliminate them.

I'd choose between Ext3, Reiser and maybe XFS. Reiser has particular optimisations for lots of small files and is usually faster where there are lots of small files (the usual case for a lot of systems).

Ext3 is thoroughly open source, is an enhanced version of ext2 and (probably) will be capable of a simple upgrade to ext4, when that's ready.

XFS is probably the best choice for multi-terabyte storage with a preponderance of multi-gig files.

(And, remember, your choice of distro may not offer you all of those choices.) And also; if you have several partitions, each partition could be set up slightly differently, although having a dozen partitions each set up differently is probably going over the top. And if you are concerned about being able to read from windows, set aside one partition with the fat filesystem that you can use to dump transfer files to (but this only comes about in the multi-boot scenario or if one machine is acting as a fileserver to the other {and then only indirectly} - what someone uses on a different machine is of little interest to you).

Oh, and there's swap - partition type swap!

I think, technically, H_TeXMeX_H's comment may be correct. At one point, wasn't Microsoft's confidence in their steaming pile of stuff so great that their licence conditions didn't actually allow you to use their filesystems (and the OS more generally) if the outcome was going to be that you made public comments about their shortcomings? At least under one iteration of their EULA.

I suspect that here, at least, it would be difficult to the courts to support that as a legitimate license condition (but IANAL) and the bad publicity might be worse for MS than the bad comments (but who knows what that counts for with Ballmer in charge). But still...

Yeah, I know there was an article on it, but I've tried to find it again and I can't seem to find it, maybe it's on one of those benchmark links ? Of course M$ considers that Linux and GNU are highly illegal and that users of Linux should pay royalty to the great evil empire and emperor. Either way, NTFS must be quite sucky if they decided to do this.

How do you want to share/transfer data with your friends? linux can read/write to both FAT and NTFS file systems. Typically external drives are preformatted FAT from the manufacture so no problems there except that your limited by the max file size. file systems are not a factor if transferring data over the network.