On Fri, 17 Apr 2009, Ross Walker wrote:
Time to format isn't really an issue as it is done once before being put into production. The biggest concern is processing performance and time to fsck as well as data integrity and recoverability.
Listen, when you're talking a multi TB or PB file system it *is* an issue I assure you. With disk sizes growing like they are it is only going to get worse. This is a concern for a great many of us.
Besides XFS allocates inodes on the fly, that's why it's so fast formatting, but why ext4 is a little faster processing.
EXT4 is in a few edge cases faster due to this, but XFS is still very fast in almost all other scenarios despite this.