The Verdict Filesystems

And the winner is... XFS! It scored the most points in our tests and made the best impression. XFS is super-fast, rock solid and universal. You don’t need to be aware of its design or learn about the stripe-aware policies or delayed space allocation fused inside XFS. Just format your drive with XFS and you have nothing to worry about, whatever type of drive you use: mechanical, SSD, NVMe or USB flash. Nothing’s perfect, though, so we still recommend keeping a backup of your data elsewhere. We couldn’t manage to break XFS and deliberately lose data, but you may not be so lucky. The advantage of XFS is its handling of lots of small files on USB flash storage. Frequent, incremental writing and random reading from flash storage are where XFS shines, delivering excellent performance.

Next is Ext4, the best-known and most widely used filesystem on Linux. Apart from the USB performance test, Ext4 is as good as XFS. Historically, most experts recommended using Ext4 for the root partition (/) and XFS for /home, and we see no reason why this advice isn’t still valid.

In third place is Btrfs. This filesystem has been under active development for the past decade. It shows very good performance on most types of drives, but brings some overheads. How can it maintain its live incremental snapshots without compromising speed? The answer is in higher CPU usage and the fact that you can run out of free disk space even if you think you have enough. Btrfs has been promoted as a default root filesystem in several Linux distributions – Fedora and openSUSE to name just two – but we’re still not sure whether it can survive a sudden power outage as well as Ext4 or XFS.

Next is Reiser5. We need to stress that the latest Reiser5 is far faster than the old Reiser4 in most cases. Despite the fact that we didn’t use logical volumes within Reiser5, its regular performance was good. Looking at our synthetic and real-world usage tests, it would be fair to say that Reiser5 is roughly 15 per cent slower than Ext4 in regular reading/writing operations when used on everything except for mechanical hard drives (sadly, it’s simply too slow there). And, let’s not forget that Reiser5 was easy to break, so make sure you always unmount it properly if you want your data to remain uncorrupted.

As for NTFS-3G, it’s rock solid yet painfully slow. The newer NTFS3 driver should fix it – and early tests report it to be five times faster than NTFS-3G. But even if it was already that fast, it wouldn’t help NTFS much to a win in this Roundup.