Why is an Ext4 disk check so much faster than NTFS?

Posted by Brendan Long on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Brendan Long
Published on 2011-03-11T18:08:24Z Indexed on 2011/03/12 16:12 UTC
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Filed under:

filesystems

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ntfs

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ext4

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check-disk

I had a situation today where I restarted my computer and it said I needed to check the disk for consistancy. About 10 minutes later (at "1%" complete), I gave up and decided to let it run when I go home.

For comparison, my home computer uses Ext4 for all of the partitions, and the disk checks (which run around once week) only take a couple seconds. I remember reading that having fast disk checks was a priority, but I don't know how they could do that.

So, how does Ext4 do disk checks so fast? Is there some huge breakthrough in doing this after NTFS came out (~10 years ago)?

Note: The NTFS disk is ~300 GB and the Ext4 disk is ~500 GB. Both are about half full.

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