Your choice of File System


What is your favourite Linux file system?  

57 members have voted

  1. 1. What is your favourite Linux file system?

    • ext2
      2
    • ext3
      16
    • ReiserFS (Namesys)
      9
    • Reiser4 (Namesys)
      7
    • XFS (SGI)
      0
    • JFS (IBM)
      0
    • HFS (Mac)
      3
    • FAT/NTFS (through VirtualPC?)
      1
    • Other
      1
    • I am a Windows/Macintosh/non-Linux user but I wanted to vote
      18


Recommended Posts

After using linux for nearly 2 months now, I'm more than convinced I'll never go back to Xtremley Painful. Becoming more confident with it, I lashed out and bought Mandrake LE 2005, after trying a few different distros, I found that LE 2005 was perfect for what I wanted it for, great drivers, easy setup/update, etc. My intial setups were pretty much "vanilla" straight out of the box, I let the setup partition my hard drive on its own, thinking... It knows best. Then a few days ago I tried to extract an iso from a 2gig tar... well... pfffffffffffftttttttttt! I ran out of tmp space didn't I.

Seems the default "/" partition is only 5gig or so, and the rest is for /home. I decided to do a complete reinstall and partition the HD to my own liking. I made my "/" partition 12gig and the rest for /home. I decided to use reiserfs instead of ext3 for both partitions.

I found reiserfs to be noticably quicker. What's your fave FS for linux?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I use ext3, but next time I find myself in need of something interesting to do to my computer, I'll probably switch to ReiserFS.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It depends (surprise!) - but ReiserFS was the best choice:

- EXT2: slow as hell (as in: almost as slow as FAT32), no journaling, but absolutely stable.

- EXT3: basically EXT2 + journaling. Supposed to be quite stable and considerable faster then EXT2.

- ReiserFS: Journaling FS designed from scratch for Linux. Very stable, fast and efficient, especially while handling lots of small files. Best stable overall filesystem.

- XFS: A filesystem developed by Silicon Graphics for their proprietary IRIX OS. Very stable and extremely fast when handling only a few large files (databases, serious movie editing).

- JFS: IBM's AIX filesystem, similar to XFS in terms of focus, stability and performance.

- Reiser4: Namesys' latest and greatest filesystem. The worlds fastest, most secure, most extensible, most efficient and most powerful filesystem. The only truely atomic filesystem on the planet, and it sports a plugin architecture for transparent encryption, compression, stuff like that. It also features a unique way to handle metadata ("everything is a directory"-approach), which also plugin-based. But it's not yet considered stable and not included in the vanilla Linux kernel (in MM right now). I'd say it'll become usable in late 2005/ early 2006.

On a side note: all FS's but EXT2 are faster than _any_ version of NTFS...

There are many other filesystems on Linux, real and virtual ones, Minix, BFS, NFS, FUSE. But they are not an option, for different, obvious reasons. Still, FUSE is something to keep on the radar - it's a virtual user-space filesystem that allow you to mount pretty much anything as if it were a regular partition: ftp, sftp, WebDAV, GMail... And it's possible to use KDE's KIO architecture to add additional virtual filesystems (FISH, IMAP, POP3, NNTP, digital cameras, OBEX...).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

[Poll Added]

In theory, my favourite would probably Reiser4 but I'll wait until that is added as an install option rather than kludge something for my bootup volume.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I use ext3, but next time I find myself in need of something interesting to do to my computer, I'll probably switch to ReiserFS.

586027698[/snapback]

me too probably.. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.