The executive summary in my own words of which filesystem to pick if you’re wondering which is best. I’m avoiding jargon or anything overly technical. I also provide some made-up* graphs to help with quick decision making.
Overview
- Ext2 – Old. Don’t bother.
- Ext3 – Lacking in performance though very solid and reliable with a huge number of tools to fiddle with.
- Ext4 – More reliability and a little extra speed over ext3.
- XFS – Sci-fi name and also very fast but lacks the same level of error protection as some others. Undelete is almost impossible. Doesn’t like powercuts.
- JFS – Like XFS but more reliable after a powercut. Very fast and low CPU usage making it ideal for old PCs and new alike.
- ReiserFS – Was good, but showing its age and no longer actively developed.
What do you want?
Speed
- XFS
- JFS
- ReiserFS
- ext4
- ext3
- ext2
Reliability
- ext3
- ext4
- JFS
- ReiserFS
- ext2
- XFS
Epic Graphs
* when I say made-up I mean that. They’re from my own experiences and reading various contradictary benchmarks. There are so many contradictions on speed and reliability out there that I think a rough guide is just as good as any of the other meticulously biased graphs out there. They can be argued as innacurate. But this is my blog – my goddamn rules! If I want pretty graphs I will HAVE pretty graphs!
After the gushing praise I keep hearing about TextMate I installed a plugin for Vim which aims to give some of the benifits – though I’m yet to be convinced of its merits*.