Thecus NAS Advances Into EXT4

While tech people know the benefits of EXT3, the average person may not know how it improves on EXT4, according to Thecus Technology Corp..

EXT4 is the next step in the evolution of Linux’s most commonly used file system, which many servers run, including NAS. To put it in perspective, there was a nearly 10-year gap between EXT3 and EXT4, making this a jump in performance, expandability, and behind-the-scenes methods of organizing data.

One of the first things you notice with EXT3 is a thorough rollback of limitations across the board. The limitation on individual file size jumps from 2TB to 16TB, individual volume size from 8TB to 16TB (and soon expanding further), and number of folders in a volume from 32,000 to 64,000. This is all to accommodate the speed of progress in the computer industry: as disks grow larger and computers grow faster, you need a system that can handle the newest hardware today, tomorrow, and 10 years from now.

The holy grail of computing is speed. The problem is it always costs money. With EXT4 you get a performance boost for no cost. EXT4’s Extents, replacing the previous data mapping method, saves data into larger blocks for improved performance working with large files. This also reduces fragmentation, which can cause slowdowns and wasted, unusable disk space. File system checks are also faster in EXT4 because of efficient organization as the system keeps files together on disks and labels empty space, making sure that data are intact, especially on larger disks where it’s needed.