I’ve been using Windows XP on my computer for some time before switching to Ubuntu. Ubuntu was really great. Really fast to start up, load apps, everything was cool. But there was one really big problem.

The computer would slow down drastically while copying huge files, and I even lost a few DVDs by trying to start a music player while burning! I thought it was some hardware compatibility issue. “Of course, Ext3 is a great filesystem. Everything that is FOSS is great!”, was what I was thinking. How very wrong I was!

It was because of the really bad design of the Ext3 filesystem! Its not only slow, it also wastes much more space than any other filesystem. On a 160GB partition, around 15GB would be reserved by the file system for its own use! Thats almost 10% of the entire space! What the fuck were the designers thinking?

Anyways, it took me a while to figure out the alternative. ReiserFS!! And when I tried it, it was loads better than Ext3 or NTFS. Actually, I’ve never given much attention to the filesystem, but after Ext3, ReiserFS is like heaven!

Just to do a benchmark, I used a simple script to create 10,000 files on an empty folder. The script took around 8 hours in an Ext3 partition, where as, on an Reiser drive, it took 20 minutes to complete. And from what I read on the internet, Reiser is as stable as Ext3, and is even more fault tolerant!

I just dont know if its possible to convert a partition from Ext3 to ReiserFS without losing data. If it is possible, I’d be really happy to find out how.

Lets hope Ext4 does better than this. Wiki says Ext4 can support volumes that are as big as 1 ExaByte (EB), which is more than a billion GigaBytes (GB). I wonder if there will ever be single volumes that big.

Well, somebody please tell me that its not some patent infringement issue thats preventing Ext3 from performing.