AFAIR there are free ext2 drivers for Win out there. You can use them on ext3 partitions, they just don't use journaling as far as I know (not to use an abbreviation again ).

Check out this podcast for a good explanation of partitioning and the different filesystems:
http://www.linuxreality.com/podcast/...d-filesystems/

Hi, I vote ext3.

Also I will extend this by pointing you to the best page I have ever found on performance tuning your ext3 patition.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t...-dirindex.html

So the next time you make an ext3 fs, remember this little extra:

mke2fs -j -O dir_index -L YOUR_LABEL /dev/sdxN (thats a cap o in there)

you may as well man mke2fs and tune2fs.

Cheers

I used to use EXT2 and bought a UPS because of the impact of power outages to the filesystem.

I've been using EXT3 since it came out, it happily withstands unexpected power interuptions, so much so that I didn't bother replacing my UPS when it went bang (literally).

I've also used JFS and it seems quite robust as well. JFS seems to allocate space a little more efficiently (ie your formatted capacity is a little higher) and performs faster, and also seems to handle unexpected power outages just fine.

I'd recommend using EXT3 for any operating system partitions since that is what the os is developed and tested to use, but JFS is great for things like video storage.

XFS scares the hell out of me... it may well be ok but the stuff I've read about it indicate that it would not handle an unexpected power outage without data loss. (Maybe one day I'll replace that UPS)

If you are going to use Ubuntu then it will default to ext3 and I have persoannlly found, as other have indicated, that it is very reliable. I have also used ReiserFS and XFS, but I also believe that ext3 is all that is required for desktop use.

Also, remember to break up your partitions on the drive. eg. /boot, /, /home, swap. After the installation is complete edit your fstab to make /boot read only.

My Debian desktop uses EXT3 as the OS filesystem, and XFS filesystem for my personal disk space. I simply chose the default EXT3 when I installed Sarge (now Etch). After some research I chose XFS as my other partitions after I wiped out the WinXP partition and the FAT32 parition shared between them. XFS seemed to be the best all around filesystem. That machine does experience random powerloss from time to time and a system crash (chipset overheated). Both EXT3 and XFS remain fully intact.

My laptop uses ReiserFS for Debian Sid partition, as Grub supposably doesn't like to boot XFS partitions, and since I occasionally dual boot into WinXP, that partition and my shared partition are NTFS. I have had no problems with either filesystem there either. My laptop battery has died on me a couple times under Debian and WinXP before I did a shutdown. I use the ntfs-3g driver and have had no read/write issues at all, and I constantly use the laptop. The only deal is if you hibernate WinXP it locks the partition so booting into Linux after means no available (not even readable) NTFS partitions.

I would stay away from FAT32 if you can. It has a 4GB file size limit and can easily be fragmented and damaged (brings back memories of Win98)

Ext3 is the best option at this time, IMHO.

I have been using Ext3 for several years and ext2 for years prior to that. It is well supported, stable, and reliable. As you mentioned, speed difference between the various formatting options for a desktop are insignificant.

Stay away for any dos/windows format if at all possible.

Jeff

Some info on all the filesystems mentioned plus more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

As you already learned from most answers, ext3 is fine for small filesystems, and is the general conservative choice.

The other choice I favor is XFS because it has a long history that predates Linux, and has several advantages over ext3. It used to be a proprietary filesystem of SGI, who open sourced it at some point and contributed the code to Linux. Especially when building large storage systems for 64bit servers, XFS is the filesystem of choice.

Ext3 takes a very long time to initialize, and it gets worse with size.
Ext3 has a 2TB (8TB when using larger blocksizes) per filesystem size limit.
Ext3 has a fixed amount of inodes. You can modify the amount of inodes, but if you make the wrong choice, you can end up with a filesystem that has still terabytes of free space but can't create files because there are no inodes left - happened to one of our customers.
Ext3 and LVM tuning needs more expertise.

XFS initializes multi-TB filesystems in a few seconds, usable immediately.
XFS has a 16TB filesystem limit only in 32bit, 9 million TB limit in 64bit
XFS queries LVM about stripe sizes of the underlying storage volume.

See more details on http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/

Michael Will

I have used the FAT, FAT16 and FAT32 systems in DOS and Windows, NTFS in Windows, EXT2 and EXT3 in Linux.

When I am using a dual boot system I create a partition with FAT, a partition with NTFS and a partition with EXT3. The NTFS is used by Windows and the EXT3 by Linux. I use the FAT as a common file system to be shared by both systems. If I put a file on that system in either, it is usable by the other.

I prefer NTFS on Windows but it is not (may have been fixed) stable in Linux systems. Though EXT3 is slower to boot, it is more reliable because it uses a journal file system. Every transaction written to the HD is written to the journal file. The HD structure is updated at a later time when it is more efficient for the write to occur. This allows the system to run much more quickly. When rebooting the system the computer checks the journal file and ensures that all transactions (updates to the HD) occurred prior to the power failure (or shutdown) then empties the journal file in preparation for use. While the system is running the journal file is occasionally cleaned up to keep the file from getting too large.

I agree with others that this process makes booting a little slower, but it results in a much more stable system. Since I converted my linux systems to EXT3 I have not had to recover the file system from the command prompt. The system automatically repairs crashed systems (usually from power failure) upon power-up.

Hope this helps,

I have used EXT2/3, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS. EXT2/3 is very robust and it has undelete utilities, but you should not rely on those utilities all the time. EXT2/3 does not have high throughput for reading and writing. It also wastes space when it is used on very large capacity hard drives because 5% of the capacity for root services. This can be change to 0% using tune2fs. ReiserFS may seem like an ok filesystem, but it becomes unreliable and unstable. I strongly recommend not using ReiserFS for any computer type. JFS is fast for small and large files, but it lacks to minimize file fragmentation. Like JFS, XFS it is fast for small and large files. Also it can handle millions of files and directories very fast. Both JFS and XFS needs at least 512 MB of RAM or more to do well because its uses memory to provide high read and write throughput. XFS has a feature that other filesystems lack is parallelism. If the agcount is specify during formatting a partition to a value of around 16 to 64, it improves searching and accessing files on an XFS filesystem.

All Linux filesystems can resize (grow). Shrinking takes more work than other filesystems.

XFS is very reliable and stable filesystem although some kernels have gave it quirks (probably caused by cruel programmers).

I use XFS with custom format options for /, /home, and additional storage. I use EXT3 for /boot and /var/log.

All Linux filesystems can store the journal on a separate hard drive to improve performance and decreases the chance of corruption and in some cases disk failure. You can think of this as data + parity setup.

People that uses ReiserFS for servers are stupid. Servers are meant to be reliable and stable which ReiserFS has never provided. They should backup the data and use other filesystems that are a lot more reliable and stable.

This is half true. If the XFS utilities are compiled with the 64-bit option for 32-bit systems. A 32-bit processor can format 9 exabytes. If the user does not, they the user will have a limit. Usually the Makefiles are set to use 64-bit CFLAG option during compiling so very, very, very large partitions and files can be done.

fat 32 is best with ubuntu

This is a great quick info. Learned a couple of things from it. I personally did not know the capacity limitation, not that this is important for my system, and I have witnessed the initialization issue.

EXT3 initializing performance does decrease over time, but I thought maybe this was my perception and not a reality. Thanks for that one.

Also, do NOT use FAT32 with anything. Saw a comment regarding FAT32 and Ubuntu. Ubuntu does not even offer that as a default, so it must have been a deliberate choice. Sounds like time for you to reload.

I would only use FAT32 on small USB flash drives as it's the most compatable between other Operating Systems.


Another nice thing about XFS is that is uses much less space than EXT3 to hold the file system information, and is the faster to format. I did a test with a 8 Gib drive and these are my results:

Resier4 - 434.5 Kib
XFS - 10.15 Mib
FAT32 - 15.99 Mib
ReiserFS - 32.37 Mib
JFS - 33.58 Mib
NTFS - 41.64 Mib
EXT2 - 146.56 Mib
EXT3 - 274.64 Mib
HFS - N/A 2 Gib limit
UFS - N/A
EXT4 - N/A

XFS, Reiser4, and FAT32 were the quickest to format, and NTFS was the slowest.

Fresh installs handle most of the setup. Tune the file system by hand afterward for more speed. Automatic installations turn on journaling but do not optimize the file system. If you have already installed the system you will want to refer to SpEcIeS' post to create and tune a system manually. I don't remember the correct entry in fstab to turn on journaling, but it is necessary for ext3 to be reliable.