Re: [gentoo-user] Good/better/best filesystem for large, static video library?

["Marc Stürmer" <mail@marc-stuermer.de>]

2012/12/25 Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>:

>    Upgrading an external USB2 drive at home this Christmas morning to
> 1TB for more video storage space. One large partition, non-raid, files
> are around 1GB. The drive holds only static video files that get
> written once and don't change or get erased. No MythTV stuff or
> anything like that.
>
>    This disk reside on my main desktop machine and gets backed up
> every couple of days to another USB2 drive (FAT formatted
> unfortunately) which attaches to the TV.

Well in your usage case ext3 is still well suited enough.

Ext4 though is the superior filesystem, since it is more advanced in
technical terms. Maximum file system size in ext3 is around 16
Terabyte, something not so far ahead now even more in homes. Ext4 has
the maximum file system size of 1024 Petabyte.

ext4 also uses extents, which ext3 has not - meaning file system
checks are able to run faster. Erasing big files on ext4 works
therefore faster than on ext3. It also tends to fragment less than
ext3.

ext4 has persistent preallocation when writing large files, meaning
space is being guaranteed and most probably contiguous.

tl;dr: ext3 should be well suited enough for your computer, but if you
can reformat your hard disk drive, using ext4 will not hurt either and
you gain some faster speed.