You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs…its actually “better” right?), and I’m sure more.
I think I have ext4 on my home computer I installed ubuntu on 5 years ago. How does the choice of file system play a role? Is that old hat now? Surely something like ext4 has its place.
I see a lot of talk around filesystems but Ive never found a great resource that distiguishes them at a level that assumes I dont know much. Can anyone give some insight on how file systems work and why these new filesystems, that appear to be highlights and selling points in most distros, are better than older ones?
Edit: and since we are talking about filesystems, it might be nice to describe or mention how concepts like RAID or LUKS are related.
ZFS is a crazy beast that’s best for high end server systems with tiered storage and lots of RAM.
ext4 is really just a basic file system. Its superior to NTFS and fat as it does have extra features to try to prevent corruption but it doesn’t have a large feature set.
Btrfs is kind of the new kid on the block. It has strong protection against corruption and has better real world performance than ext4. It also has more advanced features like sub volumes and snapshots. subvolumes are basically virtual drives.
Another few older options include things like XFS but I won’t go into those.
List of filesystems: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems