ext3 vs ext4 - is there really a noticeable difference?

[Nvidiaguy07]

I did a quick install of ubuntu the other day to use on my laptop, and realized that I formatted in ext3 instead of ext4, like i normally would do.

I considered wiping the whole drive and re-installing again, but I really cant notice any differences. Ive heard that ext4 is a bit faster, but I also heard that it is less reliable.

So what are the actual differences? and are they enough where i should reinstall?

 

[Sureshot324]

You can upgrade to ext4 without reformatting.

http://maketecheasier.com/how-to-up...4-without-formatting-the-hard-disk/2009/04/21

 

[lxskllr]

Not sure about the speed, but it's been very reliable for me.

 

[weovpac]

ext4 is faster on fsck and on rm.

 

[Nothinman]

Supposedly it is, but all of my boxes have been XFS since it went 1.0 so I don't really have anything to compare it to.

 

[skrewler2]

XFS has some nice features .. I make use of the snapshot feature extensively. It's great for running MySQL innodb tables. It thrives on a low inode count w/ large files. It has crappy delete performance. XFS had a bad reputation at one point as it didn't flush to disk often enough (or something like that) which resulted in data loss should the system lose power.

Ext4 does better w/ a large amount of inodes.and deletes. I've been using it for my boxes that serve a lot of static content (mainly images). No problems with it so far.

I would definately stay away from JFS and Reiser, tho.

ext3 is still a fine filesystem, it is decent all around. For a desktop system, you probably wont notice much difference anyways. Definately not worth reformatting over.