[clug] EXT4 Reliability

[Anshul Gupta]

Performance wise ext4 filesystem is better because of extents and  
persistent preallocation which improves performance slightly. Somebody  
might argue it's better for movie files because of contiguous  
allocation and will wear the disk less thereby reduce the risk of disk  
failure.

However I prefer ext3 just because it has been around for many years  
and it's rock solid. Ext4 is still new. Also ext4 filesystem are not  
as reliable due to delayed allocation. Also if ext3 disk fails you  
will find many tools to recover data. That being said, for your  
important data you should always use some sort of RAID.  And you can  
always migrate ext3 filesystem to ext4 in future.

FAT32 is the most portable filesystem but not as stable and reliable  
as ext[34]. And using FAT32 filesystem you might not be able to import  
directly on the USB disk as the write speed will be limited by the  
filesystem. NTFS for Linux host doesn't make sense.

Cheers, Anshul

On 29/09/2009, at 7:01 PM, Ian McLeod wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm not concerned about performance, I am interested purely in  
> reliability.  Say a few sectors die or something after a few years,  
> will EXT4 perform better than FAT or NTFS as recovering data.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ian
>
> Anshul Gupta wrote:
>> EXT4 is stable as of 2.6.28 and I don't doubt it's stability.  
>> However for storing my important data I will still go for ext3.  
>> Also not to mention that not all my computers are running recent  
>> kernel and for USB disk I would like a filesystem recognised by most.
>>
>> You can even mount ext3 partition as ext4 to get some performance  
>> improvements from ext4 drivers.
>>
>> Cheers, Anshul
>>
>> On 29/09/2009, at 6:32 PM, Ian McLeod wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Everyone,
>>>
>>> I am compiling a backup of wedding master tapes and photos and was  
>>> about to use the usual route of NTFS support on an external drive  
>>> in Ubuntu - and stopped and thought - do I *need* NTFS for a  
>>> backup drive?  Why not use a (possibly more reliable) Linux file  
>>> system?
>>>
>>> So I promptly re-formatted a USB drive as EXT4 and I am happily  
>>> copying across gigs of precious data after chown'ing to my username.
>>>
>>> Is EXT4 reliable for USB external drive backup purposes?  Quick  
>>> reading on the Internet seems to suggest so.  I presume especially  
>>> compared to NTFS.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Ian
>>> -- 
>>> linux mailing list
>>> linux at lists.samba.org
>>> https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/linux
>>