criminal-auctioneer8616

I'd like to request support for EXT4 in the array and pools. There are a few reasons I believe this would benefit users: 1. It's a much lighter FS than anything that is supported at the moment. XFS is granted lighter than BTRFS or ZFS, but still requires more resources than EXT4. Not everyone can afford to throw hardware at things just to have a filesystem that's got features they may not use. 2. EXT4's stability is renowned in the linux community. It is the default for many distros, and recommended for home use. BTRFS is still considered unstable by most linux users and communities. 3. Recovery ability is essentially the best of all filesystems, due to such ubiquitous usage in the community. The tools are mature, robust, and easy to use. 4. Simplicity. It's a file system. It's not trying to be a partition manager, RAID software, etc. 5. EXT4 is exceptionally fast when dealing with smaller files. I'm sure there's some other benefits, but I'm not trying to make an exhaustive list here. Please do consider adding EXT4 support to the array and pools. Thank you!

That thread also points out why EXT4 is used as default on many linuxes, and BTRFS is not.

XFS ticks most of those things yes, but it is definitely not as good with smaller files. I appreciate that XFS has more features than EXT4, but EXT4 is quite lighter on the system and not everyone uses/needs those features. Perhaps it does just come down to trusting the familiar, which I don't think I'm alone in that thought, but I feel that having the choice of just a "basic" filesystem still has its use cases.

Better small file performance, less resource usage/overhead for those of us that don't have expensive servers to host UnRAID on, more robust toolset for recovery and maintenance, and this last one isn't anything technical, but just the trust in a filesystem that's been around forever.

I'd like to ask for EXT4 support.