I want to learn more about file systems from the practical point of view so I know what to expect, how to approach them and what experience positive or negative you had / have.

I found this wikipedia’s comparison but I want your hands-on views.

For now my mental list is

  • NTFS - for some reason TVs on USB love these and also Windows + Linux can read and write this
  • Ext4 - solid fs with journaling but Linux specific
  • Btrfs - some modern fs with snapshot capability, Linux specific
  • xfs - servers really like these as they are performant, Linux specific
  • FAT32 - limited but recognizable everywhere
  • exFAT - like FAT32 but less recognizable and less limited
  • nickiam2
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    1 month ago

    I use ext4 for all boot drives and root filesystems. Anything really important goes on a ZFS array. And for my Linux isos, I use a drive with ext4 + snapraid. The parity drive has xfs because ext4 has a 16tb file size limit.

    Got rid of anything NTFS as it was unreliable and slow on Linux.