I'm planning how to partition my hard drive.
I want to have 2 partitions – one for Ubuntu, the main operating system, and the other for virtual machine images, as I want to run virtual machines of Windows and MacOS through VirtualBox.
My question is – what's the best file-system for the virtual machines partition?
Are there any advantages performance-wise to using a file-system other than, say, FAT32 or NTFS?
Best Answer
I would put your VM images on a seperate spindle. Having them on a seperate disk with a large cache is likely to yield a much larger performance boost than which filesystem you use.
Given that a corruption in a VM image could be catastrophic, I would be looking at robustness of filesystem over performance. Is it likely to survive a power failure, for example? So (to use the examples you've cited) I would certainly use NTFS over FAT32, regardless of performance characteristics, simply because it is a journaling filesystem and therefore much more fault tolerant.