PRELUDE:
Recently I bought the second 750G hard drive Seagate with 32M cache. The first one was 750G Western digital with 16M cache. I bought it because I was out of space because I kept all I have on hard drive, rather than kept it on DVDs, because I share data with other users (local P2P atm).
So I decided to use the old Western digital as data one to keep music, movies, install files and all that is mostly read-only accessed thus giving my old hard drive a break after running for over half a year mostly 24h a day. So I went on copying data from old hard drive to the new one. First I found out that the disk with 32M cache is about 2-4 times faster on writing! So that's only sane it is used for system read-write. When I backed up everything I decided I will have single partition on the old hard drive for data. I was wondering which filesystem to choose. As a Linux user, I like ReiserFS as it is faster than Ext3 (while Ext4 is not yet out atm). But as a sane person I know I need to access the data from Windows too (playing games). First, I thought to use tools like Ext2FS for Windows and ReiserFS tool to access either volume from Windows. Both sucked too much. Ext2 one couldn't deal with Russian language, though I tried cp866, cp1251, utf-8, nothing helped. And ReiserFS one only works in cmd.exe. So back to old good NTFS, thanks ntfs-3g driver is now shipped by default with Slackware (distro I use since 10.0).
TOPIC:
Choosing among the three filesystems gave me some interesting results on the amount of system data they require to work. At the top you can see images with the results. It was really disgusting to know Ext3 eats about 1.5% of your space (which results in 11G of literally wasted space here) just to keep files. While NTFS and ReiserFS both eat under 100M of space, about 0.12% and 0.08% respectively. Notice, that ReiserFS eats about 1.6 times less than NTFS. I didn't know ReiserFS also rules in the space too :)
Though, the ReiserFS4 was sabotaged: http://linuxhelp.150m.com/jews/saboteurs.htm (in flavor of Ext4?)
