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ZiNgA BuRgA · 13/12/2009 06:40 AM

The following driver provides ability to mount ext2/ext3 filesystems on Windows: http://www.fs-driver.org/

By default, Windows comes with a pitiful selection of supported file systems - FAT/exFAT and NTFS (and some CD/DVD/BD ones like UDF).
FAT is kinda old and kludgy - exFAT really just extends the size limitations of FAT.
Thus NTFS is really the only decent file system, however it's quite a bloated one with stuff like ACLs, legacy 8.3 filename support etc which I'd probably never use.
Basically had been looking for another filesystem which supports journaling which I can use to store stuff on.
The above ext3 driver looks nice. Am just wondering how well it compares to NTFS in performance though, since it doesn't have the overheads of maintaining ACLs.

Anyone tried this yet?

(would also be nice if wee could have support for other filesystems on Windows >_>)

feinicks · 13/12/2009 06:42 AM

No.. Its really surprising that more efficient filesystems (like in linux and mas OS) are ignored in Windows but supported due to demand in other OSes

Starfox444 · 13/12/2009 07:20 AM

I was wondering how it compares in terms of capacity. I remember reformatting a flash drive that was FAT32 to NTFS and it gained an extra 100 MB of capacity.

PSPkiller · 13/12/2009 08:20 AM

I've tried using that driver before to access the Linux partition on my laptop from XP. It just corruoted both filesystems...

Hopefully you'll do better than me.

Mickey · 13/12/2009 08:52 AM

I've used it to access the linux partition and it worked fine for me

Joom · 13/12/2009 09:12 AM

Does this support EXT4?

PSPkiller · 13/12/2009 02:05 PM

Joomla12 Wrote:Does this support EXT4?

Maybe that's why it crapped up for me...

ZiNgA BuRgA · 13/12/2009 04:56 PM

Starfox444 Wrote:I was wondering how it compares in terms of capacity. I remember reformatting a flash drive that was FAT32 to NTFS and it gained an extra 100 MB of capacity.

NTFS _should_ always take up more space than FAT32. Even on a blank drive, NTFS will consume a fair about of space.
NTFS has to store stuff like ACLs and Journaling info, which FAT doesn't store.

PSPkiller Wrote:
Joomla12 Wrote:Does this support EXT4?

Maybe that's why it crapped up for me...

Doesn't support ext4, though it may be backwards compatible.

Quote:The ext4 filesystem is backward compatible with ext3 and ext2, making it possible to mount ext3 and ext2 filesystems as ext4. This will already slightly improve performance, because certain new features of ext4 can also be used with ext3 and ext2, such as the new block allocation algorithm.

The ext3 file system is partially forward compatible with ext4, that is, an ext4 filesystem can be mounted as an ext3 partition (using "ext3" as the filesystem type when mounting). However, if the ext4 partition uses extents (a major new feature of ext4), then the ability to mount the file system as ext3 is lost.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ext4

Threaded Mode \| Linear Mode Anyone used ext3 filesystem on Windows?
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