Why is an Ext4 disk check so much faster than NTFS?
- by Brendan Long
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.