One thing that always surprised me about the ext3 file system was it was so quiet that I rarely would hear any activity, especially when compared to running the NTFS in XP (on the same hard drive). Just about the only the time the drive made any noise in Linux using ext3 was when loading a large application, e.g., OpenOffice.

With ext4, the default file system for Slackware 13 & Slackware64, I'm hearing quite a bit of hard drive activity.

I don't know the first thing about it, but the first question that comes to mind in this regard would be,

is ext4 as efficient as ext3?

Thanks.

According to this, ext4 is a step in the right direction but has regressed in some respects since ext3, but the surprise result is that reiser4 performs significantly better than either in some tests.

I see no difference, if not something slightly in favor of ext4. Are you sure that the two systems you compare differ only in the filesystems? If you did a fresh installation of Slack 13.0 maybe there's a new piece of software or change in settings causing the high activity?

Hi,

'I Feel the Need for Speed: Linux File System Throughput Performance, Part 1' is a good read to gain a little insight.