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Filesystems Comparison
__Basic characteristics__
*''Ext2'' - Fast, not journalled. Use for unimportant partitions (/tmp).
*''Ext3'' - Balanced, slight loss of disk space (some reserved for performance reasons, so not entirely bad, see Reiser comments for more), very stable, very good recovery tools, dir_index option may significantly improve performance, wastes space on small files.
*''Reiser'' - Painfully slow mounting (seems to have been fixed on more recent kernels), fast on many small files, may be worse than ext3 about wasting disk space for fs alone - different benchmarks seem to disagree on this, uncertain of the reason, definitely better than ext3 for not wasting space on small files.
*''XFS'' - Designed for large files/filesystems. Good for storage drives. Decent all-around performance as well. Slightly obscure, so not as well supported.
*''JFS'' - A little too obscure for my tastes, very good on CPU usage, so maybe good for older file servers. According to some benchmarks the best performing as well.
__Recommendations__
/home - ext3
/tmp - ext2
/usr/portage - reiser
/ - ext3/reiser - not clear which would have better performance in this situation, have seen conflicting data, probably a toss-up, may depend on which options are used with both, probably recommend ext3 for stability and reiser for (maybe) better performance.
/share - xfs
__References__
#Good comparison of filesystem performance
#Small extension to the above (more real world examples = takes priority IMHO)