i've been using linux for a few months now ... and i'm loving it
when i installed linux i formatted my HD to ext2 but i notice there's other choices
i couldn't find any decents sites that explained the differences in layman's terms
could someone perhaps give me some input on this or maybe point me in the right direction ?

i'd appreciate it
thanks

ext2 is no good if you have a power failure or kids get to your reset button and do a hard reset, you'd be better off using ext3 whcih is basically ext2 with journalling functionality. THat's what I use and have never had a problem, works a treat. The other major one for consumer PCs is ReiserFS, it's newer than ext whcih you may prefer and I've never tried it so I can't really comment but I know I've seen a few threads about here with reiser-related problems.

There are also things like XFS and JFS but they're more aimed towards the server market where high throughput is important and for systems with much more RAM than the average home PC has to play with.

I'd say swap to ext3 -
which as you can see is very easy and leave it at that but I'm sure other people will come along with their views

I used many filesystems. I use ext3 for /boot. For /, I use XFS. For /home, I use ReiserFS. For my other hard drives I use XFS. No XFS and JFS is not really use for servers.

ext2 is the basic and one of the first Linux filesystem. Usually its called a native Linux filesystem. It can easily be converted to ext3 without harming the data, but I suggest backing up the data.

ext3 takes ext2 and adds journal. The journal helps minimize data corruption during a power outage or accidently reset.

ReiserFS is very different than ext2 is that its a tree filesystem. This make it fast when searching for files. This filesystem is designed to be efficient on file storage and group file items in a directory. ReiserFS works better for small files and it is limited on how many files can be in a directory.

XFS was created for silicon graphics computers for throughput and speed. Its a 64-bit tree filesystem which can run on both 32-bit and 64-bit system, so files can be several terabytes in size. XFS is very different how it works than other filesystems. Its designed to read and write from memory. XFS only writes and reads from and to a harddrive when it needs to. It has execellent searching performance and you can have a million files in a directory without having any performance penalty.

JFS is created by IBM servers for throughput and speed. It has almost the same features as XFS but it does not do any defragging. Some people say JFS is great for /usr.

ReiserFS, XFS, and JFS has built-in journal so worry about them.

thanks for the input fellas
that helps alot and gives me a much better idea on what to research