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How To Move Your Linux Systems To ext4
LinucksGirl writes "Ext4 is the latest in a long line of Linux file systems, and it's likely to be as important and popular as its predecessors. As a Linux system administrator, you should be aware of the advantages, disadvantages, and basic steps for migrating to ext4. This article explains when to adopt ext4, how to adapt traditional file system maintenance tool usage to ext4, and how to get the most out of the file system."
I can't wait for faster fsck. It takes something like an hour on my 500GB ext3 partition. Terabytes of storage are not that far away.
I'm an XFS fan as well. I have been using it for years. I usually have my root/boot partition as ext3 (so grub works) and all data on XFS.
XFS kills ext in terms of not losing data. I have recovered lots of data from failed drives that were XFS formatted. Not so with ext3 which tends to flake out and destroy itself when it gets bad data.
And don't even mention ReiserFS, that has always sucked. I have lost more data to Reiser than any other filesystem (ext is a close second though). Sometimes it would corrupt files just from rebooting the machine. I have never lost data on an XFS partition that wasn't due to hardware failure.
I have the following disks in my computer:
1 TB
500 GB
300 GB
When they decide to fsck at the same time, it can take 1/2 hour or longer to get to the login screen.
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This is why we have XFS. I fscked a 9TB partition is under 10 minutes. Hopefully they've done some improvements for ext4 in this area. A volume that takes days to fsck might as well just die completely.
Ext4 has a lot of performance improvements, like extents or delayed allocation. Desktop users will notice that ext4 is much faster
That said, ext4 is unstable. It can easily eat your data. Just say NO to moving your filesystem to ext4 - for now.
btrfs -- How fast are deletes?
ext3 is both so slow and so bottlenecked that mythtv had to implement a special "slow delete" mode which gradually truncates files instead of just unlinking them. Without the "slow deletes" mode, you get hiccups in any shows that are being recorded while old shows are deleted.
On my system, deleting a 20GB file can take a minute on ext3 (and the filesystem is completely locked - all other processes are blocked), but on ntfs it is almost instantaneous.