Talk:Comparison of file systems

There does not exist any NTFS 6.0 ! There are only system extentions of Windows NT 6.0 (Vista/2008) but inside the specifications of the current NTFS 3.1 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.194.34.103 (talk) 12:45, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Nothing in the article seems to mention NTFS 6.0 at this point. Guy Harris (talk) 00:05, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

The limits in this article are not the same as in the ReFS article. The limit is 35PB. Can someone verify it and fix? ויקיטכני (talk) 19:11, 26 March 2024 (UTC)

It unfortunately seems ReFS isn't well-documented so far. I couldn't even find a source for its time granularity.

Microsoft seems to prefer keeping ReFS in the Windows server world only. The opposite happened to exFAT, where Microsoft realized in 2019 that its proprietary status limits its adoption, famously in stock Android OS (although some third-party vendors like Samsung already supported exFAT long before), so Microsoft made it open. CDVDBD 💿 📀 09:21, 1 June 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the actual term for these are, APFS calls them 'containers', btrfs 'subvolumes', zfs 'datasets', but it's the support for multiple virtual file systems, backed by the same partition on the same block device.

Would it be worth it to add another column on the support tables for these? Foxtdev (talk) 16:52, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

APFS calls them 'containers' APFS calls a disk or partition (or a RAID group) a "container", with "volumes" containing file systems inside it (and there can also a be "volume group" within a container, with multiple volumes in the volume group), at least according to Disk Utility on macOS Ventura. So the name for a file system in APFS appears to be "volume", not "container".

it's the support for multiple virtual file systems Unfortunately, virtual file system already has a different meaning, so it's not really the right choice of name.

backed by the same partition on the same block device With ZFS, a zpool can have more than one vdev, and a vdev can have multiple physical devices. As noted, macOS supports RAID, so a container can also consist of multiple physical devices, and, given Linux's LVM, the same is presumably true of whatever btrfs subvolumes are contained in.

I think of it as multiple file systems within a shared storage pool (whatever form the storage pool may take), but that may be an invented terminology. Guy Harris (talk) 19:38, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

There is no column for "last modified time stamps" in the table at Comparison of file systems#Metadata. I assume it was left out because pretty much every file system has it. Is there any file system that doesn't support it?

If all do, I suggest writing "Every file system listed in this table supports the last modified time stamp" or something like that. CDVDBD 💿 📀 08:59, 1 June 2025 (UTC)

I added a note at the bottom, worded in a way that does not exclude the possibility of such a file system existing out there, but if it does, it is very obscure at least. CDVDBD 💿 📀 09:46, 1 June 2025 (UTC)

Whether TRIM is supported is a question of how the driver / operating system implements the file system, not of the file system. Technologically, nothing would stop the 1978 Unix File System from being used with TRIMs emitted for disused blocks (because, as almost all file systems on this page, it's block based, and as soon as the last user of a block has stopped using it, it could be marked as unused).

That has absolutely nothing to do with "allocation and layout policies" (aside, again, from almost all file systems being block-based, because they're used on block devices; this is, as far as I can tell, even true for "absurd" things like thinking about trim on magnetic tape file systems).

Therefore, the "Trim support" column needs to be moved to a different table (in this table, it would need to be "yes (green)" from top to bottom). It might make sense to make it a symbol in entries of the "OS support" table. MüllerMarcus (talk) 11:57, 22 November 2025 (UTC)