Ext3: Except for rare hardware failures, the Ext3 file system does not require a file system check, even in case of hard shutdown. This is because of the consistency factor of the file system. The second benefit is data integrity. The other factors are speed and easy transition from old file systems.
Ext4 or the fourth extended file system is also a journaling file system developed as a successor to Ext3. As the Ext3 file system is partially forward compatible with Ext4, the Ext4 is backward compatible with Ext2/Ext3, thus making it possible to mount the Ext3 filesystem as Ext4. This means you don't even need to convert it. The Ext4 file system is now included in most of the distributions. Talking about Ext4, the maximum filesystem size is 16 TB (32-bit block numbers) which defeats the Ext3 filesystem size of 2TB.
NTFS: This filesystem is a high-performance file system which is based on the Master File table (MFT) concept and is able to hold detailed information on files, thus allowing the use of long names. It is also a self-healing file system, which supports file level security, and data compression. Please refer to the table for a clear picture of different features of these file systems.
But while testing the same with Ext3 we found that there was hardly any difference in the bootup time as well as the shutdown time. It took around 30 seconds to bootup and 12 sec to shutdown. We also measured the time taken for copying a 100MB file from USB to HDD and vice-versa. The USB to HDD time was 8 seconds (Ext3) and 9 sec (Ext4). To copy the 100 MB folder from HDD to USB, it took 42 secs (Ext3) and 35 secs for (Ext4). We also copied a 1GB file on Fedora 12 file systems and the time taken was almost the same. Fedora 12(Ext3) OS took four mins and five seconds and the one with Ext4 file system took exactly four minutes. The time taken for Fedora 12 (Ext3 and Ext4) vs Windows 7 to boot up, shutdown and copy files was also measured. Fedora 12 took lesser time which means it was faster.
Geekbench scores: Here, the scores were 4697 for Fedora 12 (Ext3), 4668 (Ext4) and 5856 for Windows 7. The scores with Ext 4 was surprisingly lower than Ext3 and both were lower than Win 7 scores.
Conclusion: Fedora's Ext4 file system was supposed to be superior giving better results and better performance. But this was not the case. Both OSes showed similar results.
Madhur Chawla
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