ext4
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
5recommend
3warn against
Nov 11, 2025first mention
Sep 12, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“I'm honestly not sure I've ever seen any unrecoverable corruption on ext4 or ext3”
“anti-fragmentation features of EXT3/4 kept that one seek pretty cheap”
Show 3 more
“Switched to ext4 and never looked back.”
switched from Btrfson “Healthchecks.io Now Uses Self-Hosted Object Storage”
“On my NAS, I've been using ext4 with SnapRAID and mergerfs for years without issues.”
“ext4 is the only FS I'd want to see as first-party on Windows as a data drive.”
Caveats and dissent
“if ext4 was used, it will be one of reasons.”
“ext4 is all well and good until a power interruption or hard disk fault silently introduces some corruption”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Guix System First Impressions as a Nix User 3 mentions
- Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead 1 mention
- Windows 11's "special" developer edition looks like another marketing misfire 1 mention
- Do not trust the marketing IOPS on Consumer SSD 1 mention
- How to Build a Minimal ZFS NAS Without Synology, QNAP, TrueNAS 1 mention
- Removing fsync from our local storage engine 1 mention
Data: ext4.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 18
“I'm honestly not sure I've ever seen any unrecoverable corruption on ext4 or ext3”
“anti-fragmentation features of EXT3/4 kept that one seek pretty cheap”
“if ext4 was used, it will be one of reasons.”
“ext4 and mdadm can talk to each other.”
“which is more efficient than ext4 namespace management”
“Switched to ext4 and never looked back.”
“linux + ext4 has atomic single and multi block writes as of 2025”
“uses the ext4 binary tree for indexing”
“But I use ext4, yeah.”
“Ext4 also stores small (~150B) files inside the inode”
“ext4 is all well and good until a power interruption or hard disk fault silently introduces some corruption”
I'll bite. I use NixOS as a daily driver and IMO makes the underlying FS type even less important. If my main drive goes I can bootstrap a new one by cloning my repo and running some commands. For my data, I just have some rsyc scripts that sling the bits to various locations. I suppose if I really wanted to I could put the data on different partitions and disks and use the native fs tools but it's a level of detail
“On my NAS, I've been using ext4 with SnapRAID and mergerfs for years without issues.”
> I think you're missing the 2nd feature to the parent's point that I take issue with You're right, I did gloss over that point. I guess it should be noted that a lot of what fsck does[1] on say ext4 is something ZFS does on pool import, like replying the journal (ZIL) or trying older superblocks (uberblocks[2]). In that regard it's acting more like XFS[3] from what I can see. [1]: https://linux.die.net/man/8/fsck.ex
“ext4 is the only FS I'd want to see as first-party on Windows as a data drive.”
“later phones switched to ext4”
“use ext4 with metadata_csum enabled, I guess.”
“APFS, NTFS, and Ext4 on the same drive”