NTFS vs ext4 file system for houdini swap

[art3mis]

Formatting an SSD which will primarily be used as disk swap space and caching for Houdini. I primarily work i  Linux but occasionally dual boot into Windows. Should i use ext4 or ntfs or some other file system option for best performance?

Checking the wiki I see that ext4 has the option for 'Block Journalling' while ntfs has something called 'Data Deduplication'

But under the OS Support section the wiki suggests you must stick with either one of the FAT options or ISO9660 for Windows-Linux compatibility.

And benchmarks I've checked suggest FAT (other than exFat) is much slower on SSD's than ntfs .

Confusing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems

 

Edited December 25, 2017 by art3mis

[lukeiamyourfather]

FAT isn't suitable for a caching partition because it has a file size limit of 4GB. I also wouldn't use exFAT or NTFS because they're implemented in Linux via FUSE which is a user space file system framework (significantly slower and less reliable than kernel level implementation). There's a commercial product for reading ext3 in Windows but it's not something I'd rely on given the choice. There really isn't a good option that will serve both Linux and Windows. I would setup a script that formats the drive for you when you need it (one for Windows and one for Linux). Either that or just use it in one operating system rather than multiple.

If you need to use the same data in multiple operating systems consider network storage rather than local storage. Network file sharing protocols like SMB obfuscate the underlying file system so it doesn't matter what operating system the client is running. A file server with 10Gb Ethernet and many drives (or a few fast drives) can be just as fast if not faster than local storage.