I have ordered a new NAS (Synology DS710+) which has the option of an ext3 or an ext4 filesystem.

What are the pros and cons of each, and which should I use for ultimate data integrity, reliability and compatibility? Speed is less of a concern to me.

Thanks.

(I'm surprised noone responded to this one yet)

For the NAS, I'd recommend ext4. ReadyNAS is making the switch with their products, mostly to avoid the limits of ext3. With 4k block sizes, an ext3 volume is limited to 16TB. Your home NAS probably won't have that capacity quite yet, but there are a number of other benefits that come with ext4, and it's been marked production ready by enough people that I trust it now.

The Wikipedia article on ext4 does a good job of showing what is new for ext4.

I'm using ext4 on my ReadyNAS, but I don't know enough about the filesystems, or its advantages over ext3 to have made a really detailed post.

I originally went with the format when reformatting my NAS with the new WD 2TB drive. When I reformatted again after adding the Seagate drives instead, I kept it mainly because of the more reliable journaling with checksums.

I find that ext4 works well enough that I use it as the exclusive filesystem on any SSD drives -- much better than ext3 for those.

But for BIG (TB+) storage, no. XFS really rules there.

Cheers

No XFS option for ReadyNAS. And for Mac OS, no XFS either, otherwise I'd love to use that for my Mac disks.

Heh, thanks for the (belated) replies .

I guess it is a moot point now because since I updated the NAS operating system from DSM2.2-1042 (which it came with on the install CD and which defaulted to ext3) to DSM3.0-1372, the only choice is ext4 anyway. Firmware is not (easily) downgradable on Synology units so I won't bother trying to get back to ext3, anyway Synology must have enough confidence in ext4 to make it the default.

Edit: You still have a choice between ext3 and ext4 format for external drives (eSATA and USB)