Comparison of file systems
- 1 min read
- 5 chapters
Related on Lably
Through File system and Null character
General information
Sign in to keep reading
4 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
Metadata
All widely used file systems record a last modified time stamp (also known as "mtime"). It is not included in the table.
Individual file systems may record additional special types of date and time stamps. For example, the specification of ISO 9660 includes a "File Expiration Date and Time" and a "File Effective Date and Time".
Features
File capabilities
Block capabilities
Note that in addition to the below table, block capabilities can be implemented below the file system layer in Linux (LVM, integritysetup, cryptsetup) or Windows (Volume Shadow Copy Service, SECURITY), etc.
Resize capabilities
"Online" and "offline" are synonymous with "mounted" and "not mounted".
Allocation and layout policies
OS support
Limits
While storage devices usually have their size expressed in powers of ten (for instance a 1 TB solid-state drive will contain at least 1,000,000,000,000 (1012, 10004) bytes), filesystem limits are invariably powers of two, so usually expressed with IEC prefixes. For instance, a 1 TiB limit means 240, 10244 bytes. Approximations (rounding down) using power of 10 are also given below to clarify.
Many filesystems will not accept a NUL in a name (a character with value zero), so NUL is not considered in the table below, even if the text says “Any byte”.