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I have often wondered, when an update is made to ext4 for example in the kernel and then more performance updates are made to it (And they keep up adding up over time) when i upgrade to the latest Ubuntu version, do they get applied to an already internal hard drive that is using ext4 already since 10.04.

I have 2 hard drives with ext4 which i formatted a year ago. Do this performance or fixes in the kernel need a reformat to the hard drives or do the ext4 partitions need nothing more than just to connect to the new kernel.

What is the actual difference between formatting in an old Ubuntu version using an old ext4 version versus formatting a new hard drive with a new shiny Ubuntu.

Am using ext4 as an example but any other partition format applies that has received updates with the release of newer kernel versions.

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Normally these changes happen "transparently". Your filesystem on-disk remains mostly the same (unless there have been changes to the on-disk structure, which is rare), but the real change is what happens in the kernel (software level).

In essence, you don't need to reformat or anything, the changes will be carried onward. The only instance I can think of that requires physical change is when their is a new feature added, such as lets saw for example, Copy On Write support for a file system that doesn't have it normally. In such a case, the only change usually needed is to add a mount option to the FSTAB file.

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