Sunday, July 26, 2009

Ext4 File System


Ext4 file system (4th extended file system) is the next generation file systems, retaining backward compatibility with the previous file system, ext3. Ext4 was released as a functionally complete and stable filesystem in Linux kernel 2.6.28. Ubuntu 9.04 was released with support for the ext4 file system.

One of the most evident advantages of ext4 for end users is the drastic reduction in time taken to do an fseek operation of your hard drives. The other advantages of ext4 file system over ext3 are - it provides better performance and greater reliability. Also it increases the maximum file system size to a whooping 1 exabyte. Compared to this, ext3 supports a maximum of only 16 TB of file system size.

Bottom line : A drive with ext4 file system cannot be mounted within older Linux distributions as they don't have support for ext4.

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