While having coffee at home I decided to put this table together regarding Linux File Systems and their differences. Let me know if I’m missing something.
Ext2 | Ext3 | Ext4 |
Stands for Second Extended file system. | Stands for Third Extended file system. | Stands for Fourth Extended file system. |
Introduced in 1993. | Introduced in 2001. | Introduced in 2008. |
This was developed to overcome the limitation of the original ext file system. | Starting from Kernel 2.4.15 ext3 was available. | Starting from Kernel 2.6.19 ext4 was available. |
Does NOT have journaling feature. | Allows journaling. | Supports huge individual file size and overall file system size. |
Maximum individual file size can be from 16GB to 2TB. | Maximum individual file size can be from 16GB to 2TB. | Maximum individual file size can be from 16 GB to 16 TB. |
Overall ext2 file system size can be from 2TB to 32TB. | Overall ext2 file system size can be from 2TB to 32TB. | Overall maximum ext4 file system size is 1 EB (exabyte). |