Ask Fedora
In this section, we answer general questions from Fedora community. Send your questions to askfedora AT fedoraproject.org and Fedora News Team will bring you answers from the Fedora Developers and Contributors to selected number of questions every week as part of our weekly news report. Please indicate if you do not wish your name and/or email address to be published.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AskFedora
Ext4 Filesystem on Solid State Disks
A question on Ext4, that has already been made the default in the development tree headed for Fedora 11 was answered by Eric Sandeen, Red Hat ext4 and XFS filesytems developer.
Contributing Writer: Eric Sandeen
Francesco Frassinelli wrote: "I've read that in F11 ext4 will be the default filesystem. What about ext4 on solid state disk? Many websites and bloggers say that it's better to use ext2 because of the journaling, but in some kind of operation (like applying upgrades) it's sooo slow. Could we'll use ext4 on our ssd without compromising their life? TBH I haven't tested ext4 on ssd yet, though we do have some in the lab, I just haven't done it."
Eric Sandeen replied: "By default ext4 still journals pretty much the same as ext3 does, so if you want to minimize writes to your flash, it should not be significantly better than ext3 in that respect. However, there is a patch to ext4 (merged soon if not already) to allow it to run in a no-journal mode, so that may be a good option."
Thorsten Leemhuis added: "FYI, it was merged[1] for 2.6.29"