Should I convert my NTFS partitions to EXT4?

[SickBeast]

I was doing some reading and discovered that EXT4 performs much faster than NTFS, and does not require defragmentation. I have some storage partitions that are NTFS that I access through both Linux and Windows.

Is it worthwhile to convert my NTFS partitions to EXT4 and simply add EXT4 support to Windows?

TIA

 

[Voo]

and simply add EXT4 support to Windows?

Since when has that become an easy task?

 

[SickBeast]

Since when has that become an easy task?

AFAIK you can simply install a small program and it does it. I know for a fact that this can be done for EXT3.

 

[Nothinman]

I don't know if a tool to do an in-place conversion from NTFS to ext3 or 4 and I didn't think there was an ext4 driver for Windows.

 

[SickBeast]

I don't mind creating an EXT4 partition and then simply moving the files over to it from the NTFS partition.

For the sake of compatibility would I be better off going with EXT3? Is this even worth doing? Will my games load up faster on EXT3 than they would on NTFS? Perhaps I should copy the entire partition, pull out a stopwatch, and report my findings.

 

[Nothinman]

If you're planning on using that filesystem directly attached to a Windows box then NTFS is the best choice. If it's for a network share on a Linux box then ext4 or XFS are probably better choices.

 

[SickBeast]

Thanks, Nothinman. I'm going to leave it as NTFS for the time being. I spend 95% of my time under Linux but I do boot into Windows now and then.

 

[Voo]

AFAIK you can simply install a small program and it does it. I know for a fact that this can be done for EXT3.

I thought you meant installing windows itself on a ext3/4 fs, which would mean at least needing a kernel driver. If it's just accessing it from Win that would be easier, although all I know are programs with partial ext3 support - i.e. no journaling.

Would be interested if you've got some links lying around

 

[SickBeast]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2read/

I might give it a try out of curiousity. They say it can indeed read EXT4.

 

[Emulex]

most of those are userland - my NAS has ntfs - it is single threaded (uses one core max) - requires 100% of such core to do anything - it bottlenecks everything.

basically it brought the system to its knees. and you'll lose NTFS (current gen) permissions since ext4 can't store all of the metadata that ntfs has. It is not superior to windows7/2008 in many ways. Nothing as cool as XFS.

TL;DR you can do it - it will suck butt

 

[SickBeast]

most of those are userland - my NAS has ntfs - it is single threaded (uses one core max) - requires 100% of such core to do anything - it bottlenecks everything.

basically it brought the system to its knees. and you'll lose NTFS (current gen) permissions since ext4 can't store all of the metadata that ntfs has. It is not superior to windows7/2008 in many ways. Nothing as cool as XFS.

TL;DR you can do it - it will suck butt

So are you saying that XFS might be worthwhile? What about ReiserFS?

 

[Emulex]

Reiser is dead? i mean the dude killed his wife and is in prison for life.

XFS is the best filesystem - when implemented well. I'm not sure about the patents with the buyouts but yeah it rocks.

create 32767-65536 files in a dir and do a (dir/ls) and watch ext4 - ntfs -> then do it in XFS.

Only bad thing is the lack of thin provisioning on XFS - i'm not sure if they've overcome it - something about zero'ing the thin sectors causing them to flag a dirty filesystem.

If i had a stable o/s with a good implementation i'd use the stock (EXT3/journal or maybe ext4) for boot and root files and then XFS for primary storage. unless you feel the need to stack overhead might skip the LVM unless you plan to use those features.

ntfs is straight up archaic compared to XFS in many ways. i ran a webserver that held 500,000 users (html,jpeg,ya know) and had to deal with the complexity of the millions of files. tools like rsync (back 5 years ago) would just throw up on themselves and the constraints of frontpage (bleh) ruled the structure in unix.

 

[SickBeast]

Is Windows compatible with XFS? Do you know of a good program I can install to give Windows XFS support?

 

[Emulex]

no windows is compatible with fat,vfat and ntfs.

 

[SickBeast]

Too bad then.

Thanks everyone for the input.

 

[Nothinman]

Too bad then.

Thanks everyone for the input.

Yea, Windows' filesystem support is shitty. When using it you're pretty much limited to NTFS if you want it to work well. Over the network you can use whatever you want though.