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Date
May. 8th, 2026
 
2026年五月初八

Post: File-System Formats Comparison

File-System Formats Comparison

Published 17:05 May 07, 2020.

Created by @ezra. Categorized in #Undefined, and tagged as #Ubuntu Linux.

Source format: Asciidoc

Doc URL: https://hotodogo.com/doc/file-system-formats-comparison/

Table of Content
Feature ext4 Btrfs NTFS exFAT FAT32

Max File Size

16 TiB

16 EiB

256 TiB

16 EiB

4 GiB

FAT32’s 4GB limit is a major drawback

Max Volume Size

1 EiB

16 EiB

256 TiB

128 PiB

2 TiB

Typically formatted as ≤32GB

Journaling

No journal, data corruption risk

No journal, data corruption risk

Transparent Compression

Supports zstd, lzo, zlib

Copy-on-Write/Snapshots

Btrfs exclusive feature

Windows Native

3rd-party driver needed

Default system format

Built-in (Win 7+)

Built-in

macOS Native

~

3rd-party driver needed

Read-only by default

Built-in (10.6.5+)

Built-in

Linux Native

Default format

In-kernel driver

ntfs3 or NTFS-3G

Built-in (Kernel 5.4+)

Built-in

Generic Device Support

~

Common on newer models

Near-universal support

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HOTODOGO
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