I understand that ext4 if faster than NTFS. But whats the speed difference if its like < 20MB/s, perhaps its better to use NTFS for convinence? What are the other implications of this apart from performance?
3 Answers
Here is a very comprehensive Comparison of file systems.
NTFS has both read and write access now in Linux through NTFS-3G, and you can use third-party programs to gain access to an EXT2/3/4 filesystem from within a Windows operating system.
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What I do on my 500g drive is 200 Gig is ext4 300 Gig is Ntfs so what i want to share with my Windows Systems are on the 300 Gig partition. Then I just share the folders that i want the Windows Systems to see over the network. Besides its a good ideal to have a Storage Partition in case if you need to reformat and your data you wanna keep is already backed up. As long as the drive its self doesn't die your good.
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I have a 300GB drive w/ quad-boot 50GB Windows7, 20GB Kubuntu11.04 (primary boot OS 99.9% of the times), 15GB Ubuntu11.04 & 15GB Fedora6, 200GB NTFS storage drive, 130MB boot partition and 4GB swap partition. OS installations w/ individual programs are kept for each respective OS on the smaller partitions, while all downloads, music, videos and general storage goes directly on the 200GB drive w/ shared access to all. This way whenever I need to reinstall an OS it is very simple to just wipe a single partition and install onto it(which happens more of often than usual w/ a quad-boot setup).– 13eastJul 19, 2011 at 5:47
I think it's relative, and I also think the best way it's to run some small tests on your own system.
I will always recommend to use a native file system, but if you plan to share the file system, then performance it's on second place.