Specifically want to use the storage for music/video files but with a smattering of usual doc/xls/etc) – wondering if there is a concrete reason to go for one over the other.
Thanks
What are the merits of ext3 over ext4
ext3ext4storage
Related Solutions
Taken from: Linux Filesystem Primer
EXT2
- Recommended to move to EXT3
- Not Journaled
- POSIX access control
EXT2 file system is the predecessor to the EXT3 file system. EXT2 is not journaled, and hence is not recommended any longer (customers should move to EXT3).
EXT3
- Most popular Linux file system, limited scalability in size and number of files
- Journaled
- POSIX extended access control
EXT3 file system is a journaled file system that has the greatest use in Linux today. It is the "Linux" File system. It is quite robust and quick, although it does not scale well to large volumes nor a great number of files. Recently a scalability feature was added called htrees, which significantly improved EXT3's scalability. However it is still not as scalable as some of the other file systems listed even with htrees. It scales similar to NTFS with htrees. Without htrees, EXT3 does not handle more than about 5,000 files in a directory.
ReiserFS
- Best performance and scalability when number of files is great and/or files are small
- Journaled
- POSIX extended access controls
The Reiser File System is the default file system in SUSE Linux distributions. Reiser FS was designed to remove the scalability and performance limitations that exist in EXT2 and EXT3 file systems. It scales and performs extremely well on Linux, outscaling EXT3 with htrees. In addition, Reiser was designed to very efficiently use disk space. As a result, it is the best file system on Linux where there are a great number of small files in the file system. As collaboration (email) and many web serving applications have lots of small files, Reiser is best suited for these types of workloads.
The data=writeback mount option deserves to be tried, in order to prevent journaling of the file system. This should be done only during the deletion time, there is a risk however if the server is being shutdown or rebooted during the delete operation.
According to this page,
Some applications show very significant speed improvement when it is used. For example, speed improvements can be seen (...) when applications create and delete large volumes of small files.
The option is set either in fstab or during the mount operation, replacing data=ordered with data=writeback. The file system containing the files to be deleted has to be remounted.
Best Answer
Ext3 has been around since 2001 and is a logical extension of Ext2. Ext3 is regarded as being very reliable, and is available on virtually every Linux distribution. It's main feature is the ability to journal writes to the filesystem, allowing much faster crash recovery times, as there is no requirement to
fsckthe filesystem before mounting it.Ext4 is a recent revision of Ext3, which adds the ability to store large (multi megabyte, ideally gigabyte) files more efficiently using an extend based layout. The expected benefit from using Ext4 over Ext3 would be a lower accounting overhead (less blocks on disk dedicated to filesystem metadata) and an increased throughput in sequential IO as extent based filesystems tend to group data physically together, reducing internal fragmentation.