In this topic we will discuss about the different type of filesystem of windows and linux. Windows:
FAT16:
INTRODUCTION: The FAT16 file system was introduced way back with MS–DOS in 1981.
ADVANTAGE: Advantage of FAT16 is that it is compatible across a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows 95/98/Me, OS/2, Linux, and some versions of UNIX.
DISADVANTAGE: The biggest problem of FAT 16 is that it has a fixed maximum number of clusters per partition. Eg: In a 2–GB partition, each cluster is 32 kilobytes, meaning that even the smallest file on the partition will take up 32 KB of space.
FAT32:
INTRODUCTION:The FAT32 file system, originally introduced in Windows 95 Service Pack 2. As such, it greatly improves the overall disk utilization when compared to a FAT16 file system.
NTFS:
INTRODUCTION:The NTFS file system, introduced with first version of Windows NT, is a completely different file system from FAT.
ADVANTAGE: It provides for greatly increased security, file–by–file compression, quotas, and even encryption.
DISADVANTAGE: The NTFS file system is generally not compatible with other operating systems installed on the same computer, nor is it available when you've booted a computer from a floppy disk. Linux:
EXT2:
INTRODUCTION:Second extended file system for Linux released at Jan 1993. It was designed by Remy Card as it was replacing Extended File System (ext).
ADVANTAGE: This is the largest used file system as non can beat the stability ext2 file system.
DISADVANTAGE: The disadvantage of using ext2 file system is file size limitation: As no file can go beyond 2GB size. This was the main disadvantage. when apache/tomcat is using an log file when the log files goes more that 2GB it will not allow the apache/tomcat to write the log file, so apache wont serve page. Adding to this, the limit of sub-level directories is about 32768 and the number of files in an directory cannot exceed 10000 to 15000.
EXT3:
INTRODUCTION: Third Extended File System (ext3) was designed by Dr.StephenC.Tweedie Nov of 2001.
ADVANTAGE: When compared to XFS and ReiserFS, ext3 file system is little poor in performance. But the big advantage is that, it can be upgraded from the popular file system called ext2 file system without data loss or taking backup and restoring it. The mail advantage are as follows: Journaling:
IN, ext3 dose not require a file system check, even after an unclean system shutdown, except for certain rare hardware failure (e.g. hard drive failures). This is because the data is wirtten to disk in such a way that the file system is always consistent. The time of recovery in an ext3 file system after an unclean system down dose not depends on the size of files system size or the number of files in that hard disk, rather, it depends on the size of the "JOURNAL" used to maintain consistency. The default journal size take about a second to recover (depending on the speed of the hardware).
To convert from ext2 to ext3 file system: The tune2fs program can add a journal to an existing ext2 file system. If the file system is already mounted while it is being transitioned, the journal will be visible as the file .journal in the root directory of the file system. If the file system is not mounted, the journal will be hidden and will not appear in the file system. Just run tune2fs -j /dev/hda1 (or whatever device holds the file system you are transitioning) and change ext2 to ext3 on the matching lines in /etc/fstab. If you are transitioning your root file system, you will have to use an initrd to boot. Run the mkinitrd program as described in the manual and make sure that your LILO or GRUB configuration loads the initrd. (If you fail to make that change, the system will still boot, but the root file system will be mounted as ext2 instead of ext3 — you can tell this by looking at the output of the command cat /proc/mounts.) More information on tune2fs can be found in the tune2fs man page.
DISADVANTAGE: There is no online ext3 degragmentation tool working on the filesystem level. An offline ext2 defragmenter, e2defrag, exists but requires that the ext3 filesystem be converted back to ext2 first. But depending on the feature bits turned on the filesystem, e2defrag may destroy data; it does not know how to treat many of the newer ext3 features.
EXT4:
INTRODUCTION: The ext4, or fourth extended filesystem is a journalled file system in development, designed as a backwards-compatible replacement of the ext3 filesystem. Developed by Mingming Cao, Dave Kleikamp, Alex Tomas. Introduced October 10, 2006 (Linux 2.6.19).
ADVANTAGE: The ext4 filesystem can support volumes with sizes up to 1 exbibyte (1024 pebibytes). Extents are introduced to map a range of contiguous physical blocks into a single descriptor. A single extent can map up to 128MiB of contiguous space with a 4KB block size.
IBM's JFS:
INTRODUCTION: Journaled File System or JFS created by IBM. It is available under the GNU GPL. There are versions for AIX, eComStation, OS/2 and Linux operating systems. Developed by IBM. Introduced at 1990, (AIX 3.1) (AIX)
ADVANTAGE: JFS is fast and reliable, with consistently good performance under different kinds of load, contrary to other file systems that seem to perform better under particular usage patterns, for instance with small or large files. Another characteristic often mentioned, is that it's light and efficient with available system resources and even heavy disk activity is realized with low CPU usage.
VMware INTRODUCTION: VMware VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) is VMware, Inc.'s cluster file system. It is used by VMware ESX Server and the company's flagship server virtualization suite. Last release on 3 / June 2006.
ADVANTAGE: VMFS version 3 is used by ESX Server v3.x. As a most noticeable feature, it introduced directory structure in the filesystem. Older versions of ESX Server cannot read or write VMFS3 volumes
DISADVANTAGE: Can be shared only between up to 32 ESX Servers.
GFS
INTRODUCTION: Google File System (GFS) is a proprietary distributed file system developed by Google for its own use.
GFS is optimized for Google's core data storage needs, web searching, which can generate enormous amounts of data that needs to be retained. Google File System grew out of an earlier Google effort, "BigFiles", developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the early days of Google, while it was still located in Stanford. The data is stored persistently, in very large, even multiple gigabyte-sized files which are only extremely rarely deleted, overwritten or shrunk files are usually appended to or read.
SUN'S ZFS:
INTRODUCTION: ZFS is a file system originally created by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris Operating System. The features of ZFS include high storage capacity, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, a novel on-disk structure, lightweight instances, and easy storage pool management. Introduced at November 2005, implemented by a team at Sun led by Jeff Bonwick.
