[sprout]

The biggest thing about Windows (and what I think makes it an unavoidably desktop-class environment) is that there's no kernel-level support for alternate filesystems.

The various Unix-likes have a variety of filesystems with a lot of innovation going on. Windows basically just has NTFS, which while ok for the desktop is only going to serve well for some types of servers.

[runjake]

Yes, hopefully somebody will work on this some day.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/ifskit/default.mspx http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/IFSKit/ifskit_about.m... http://www.fs-driver.org/ http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/DevTools/WDK/WDKpkg.mspx http://www.acc.umu.se/~bosse/ http://www.osr.com/seminars.html

[sprout]

Sorry, is that sarcasm? I honestly can't tell. Yes, people have implemented filesystems other than NTFS for Windows. NTFS is however the only one I personally would trust on a production server, especially for the system partition.

Linux, by contrast, has a variety of filesystems that are as stable if not more so than NTFS, and ready for production use on your root partition.

Linux probably has some catching up to do with respect to Solaris and the BSDs, but it has a good cut above desktop class filesystem support.

[runjake]

I was referring to your original point that Windows didn't not have kernel-level support for alternate filesystems.

Obviously I don't know your use scenarios, but I can think of 2 Linux filesystems that I'd trust to varying extents and they both begin with "ext".

That said, I use the right tool for the right job. Much of the time it's Linux, and sometimes it's Windows 2008. Thank FSM the VMS boxes are gone.Platform agnosticism is a valuable trait to have.

Professionally, I haven't had a real use for anything other than NTFS on a wide variety of Windows servers, all the way up to double-digit TBs of data. What situations have you found NTFS inadequate for your needs?

My desktop has no direct need to handle millions of database transactions and terabytes of data, but it's nice that it can with NTFS.

[Twirrim]

Why the obsession with using one or the other? Why not see that both have their appropriate uses, strengths and weaknesses?

My focus as a Sysadmin is Linux, purely by nature of the type of work I'm in, so I tend to keep up only with the benchmarks relevant to me.

If you're only seeing ext2 & 3 as mature and stable you've missed great file systems like XFS.

ext2 & 3 are great all-rounders, but XFS will knock them into a top hat when it comes to larger files, with lower CPU usage and disk ops. It'll also beat ext2 and ext3 if you're creating and deleting lots of small files (like on an e-mail server) as the delete will take place in the background without impacting the front end systems. It's nice and mature too (16 years old). ext2 & 3 have slightly better error recovery though. XFS is journalled so very little should go wrong that would impact it.

JFS has strengths when large files are moved around on it, extremely low sector overhead (less than 1%) and very low CPU usage, amongst the lowest of any of the main Linux ones.

NTFS has no knowledge of checksumming, something ZFS, ext4 and btrfs handle (the latter two I wouldn't trust yet in production environments), but it does have integrated snapshots, something you generally have to use LVM for under Linux, and native encryption, and from Vista/2003 onwards supports shrinking and expansion directly on the fly (again LVM is necessary to do this under linux, and is best done with filesystem offline).

You chose your operating system and file system to suit the task (for example I'd use OpenBSD on a gateway machine instead of Linux as it's more suited to the role).

It's such a simple concept, like how you wouldn't use a hammer to crack an egg. You could, but you might find the edge of a knife or a spoon a lot easier and neater.

[vetinari]

Even with IFS, you cannot boot from third-party filesystem. "Root" partition is going to be NTFS anyway.