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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."
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.