i have a 250gb drive in my linux box that i want to use for storage, which file system would be best to use?

i want to keep it as 1 250gb partition and will be accessing it across my network from windows machines.

i'm using suse 9.1.

also what are the major differences between the different filesystems in linux?

ext2 is the tried and true Linux filesystem but doesn't have metadata journaling, which means that routine ext2 filesystem checks at startup time can be quite time-consuming. There is now quite a selection of newer-generation journaled filesystems that can be checked for consistency very quickly and are thus generally preferred over their non-journaled counterparts. Journaled filesystems prevent long delays when you boot your system and your filesystem happens to be in an inconsistent state.

ext3 is the journaled version of the ext2 filesystem, providing metadata journaling for fast recovery in addition to other enhanced journaling modes like full data and ordered data journaling. ext3 is a very good and reliable filesystem. It has an additional hashed b-tree indexing option that enables high performance in almost all situations. In short, ext3 is an excellent filesystem.

ReiserFS is a B*-tree based filesystem that has very good overall performance and greatly outperforms both ext2 and ext3 when dealing with small files (files less than 4k), often by a factor of 10x-15x. ReiserFS also scales extremely well and has metadata journaling. As of kernel 2.4.18+, ReiserFS is solid and usable as both general-purpose filesystem and for extreme cases such as the creation of large filesystems, the use of many small files, very large files and directories containing tens of thousands of files.

XFS is a filesystem with metadata journaling that is fully supported under Gentoo Linux's xfs-sources kernel. It comes with a robust feature-set and is optimized for scalability. We only recommend using this filesystem on Linux systems with high-end SCSI and/or fibre channel storage and a uninterruptible power supply. Because XFS aggressively caches in-transit data in RAM, improperly designed programs (those that don't take proper precautions when writing files to disk and there are quite a few of them) can lose a good deal of data if the system goes down unexpectedly.

JFS is IBM's high-performance journaling filesystem. It has recently become production-ready and there hasn't been a sufficient track record to comment positively nor negatively on its general stability at this point.

From The GENTOO handbook

i like ReiserFS best, haven't had a problem with it ever (ext2/3 i had some problems with, mainly ext2)

ReiserFS can also save some disk space to (not much, but if you have lots of small files it can save up enough space to have a new more, depends on how much disk space you have)... ReiserFS is also supposed to be one the first journaled file systems for linux, and 3.6 the file system is only tweaked for bug fixes(i guess that makes it very stable?) , (development is now on v4 which looks very nice to test out when it becomes stable enough)

tho i cant say i stand at a neutral position as ext2 (i added the log i think, so it should have been ext3, but that didn't seem to help) got totally corrupted on my laptop (Pentium pro), so i kinda have a thing against ext2/3

Well, I started off using ext2 then I changed to ReiserFS, which I was pleased with. However, a few days ago I decided (upon recommendation from a friend) to use XFS when installing Slackware 10 onto my Laptop. The performance on my laptop has improved noticeably and I honestly don't see why more people use XFS.

I agree. It is sooooooooooooo much faster than resiserFS and ext#.

it is? (i never tried xfs as i cant find anyone who says they think its fast, and there web site has no numbers on it, so i don't know if it works for me (there site didn't say how much files it could have, how much files in a directory, or not even at least if it any good))

I recomend EXT 3
Fast
Dosent screw up when the power goes down lik XFS

I've never had an XFS file system screw up on me when my power goes out. In fact, last quarter, I was writing a paper for about an hour and the power went out.... Got really pissed thinking that it was history.... Somehow it got saved. Don't ask me how... Not sure. I also had some other stuff open on another desktop. None of that was lost either. I've been using XFS for about a year and refuse to use anything else.... It's a great FS....