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List of file systems

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The following lists identify, characterise and link to fuller information on computer file systems.

Many older operating systems support only their one "native" file system, which does not bear any name apart from the name of the operating system itself. Examples of such include the CP/M file system and the Apple DOS file system. These unnamed file systems don't appear in the following list.

Contents

Disk file systems

Disk file systems are usually stream-oriented. Files in a stream-oriented file system are sequences of randomly accessible bytes, accessible via read, write and seek operations.

Record-oriented file systems

In Record-oriented file systems files are stored as a collection of records. They are associated with older mainframe and minicomputer operating systems. Programs read and write whole records, rather than bytes or arbitrary byte ranges, and can seek to a record boundary but not within records.

Shared disk file systems

Shared disk file systems (also called shared storage file systems or even cluster file systems) are primarily used in a storage area network where all nodes directly access the block storage where the file system is located. This makes it possible for nodes to fail without affecting access to the file system from the other nodes. Shared disk file systems are normally used in a high-availability cluster together with storage on hardware RAID. Shared disk file systems normally do not scale over 64 or 128 nodes.

Shared disk file systems may be symmetric where metadata is distributed among the nodes or asymmetric with centralized metadata servers.

The current world record in file system performance (january 2006) is held by GPFS from IBM with 102 GByte/s sustained read/write to a single file on the ASC Purple at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the current third fastest supercomputer.

Distributed file systems

Distributed file systems are also called network file systems. Normally many implementations have been made, they are location dependent and they have access control lists (ACLs), unless otherwise stated below.

Distributed fault tolerant file systems

Distributed fault tolerant replicate data between nodes (between servers or servers/clients) for high availability and offline (disconnected) operation.

Distributed parallel file systems

Distributed parallel file systems stripe data over multiple servers for high performance. They are normally used in high-performance computing (HPC).

Some of the parallel file systems may use object-based storage device (OSD) (In Lustre called OST) for chunks of data together with centralized metadata servers.

Distributed parallel fault tolerant file systems

Distributed file systems, which also are parallel and fault tolerant, stripe and replicate data over multiple servers for high performance and to maintain data integrity. Even if a server fails no data is lost. The file systems are used in both high-performance computing (HPC) and high-availability clusters.

All file systems listed here focus on high availability, scalability and high performance unless otherwise stated below.

In development:

Special purpose file systems

See also

External links

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