Wikipedia / Comparison of file systems
Wikipedia / Comparison of file systems
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of computer file systems.
General information
Metadata
All widely used file systems record a last modified time stamp (also known as "mtime"). It is not included in the table.
Individual file systems may record additional special types of date and time stamps. For example, the specification of ISO 9660 includes a "File Expiration Date and Time" and a "File Effective Date and Time".
Features
File capabilities
Block capabilities
Note that in addition to the below table, block capabilities can be implemented below the file system layer in Linux (LVM, , cryptsetup) or Windows (Volume Shadow Copy Service, SECURITY), etc.
Resize capabilities
"Online" and "offline" are synonymous with "mounted" and "not mounted".
Allocation and layout policies
OS support
Limits
While storage devices usually have their size expressed in powers of ten (for instance a 1TB solid-state drive will contain at least 1,000,000,000,000 (1012, 10004) bytes), filesystem limits are invariably powers of two, so usually expressed with IEC prefixes. For instance, a 1TiB limit means 240, 10244 bytes. Approximations (rounding down) using power of 10 are also given below to clarify.
Many filesystems will not accept a NUL in a name (a character with value zero), so NUL is not considered in the table below, even if the text says “Any byte”.
See also
Notes
References
External links
Filesystems (ext3, reiser, xfs, jfs) comparison on Debian Etch (April 23, 2006)
What are the (dis)advantages of ext4, ReiserFS, JFS, and XFS? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange