| 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. |