[T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy Note II] Admiral Sir Manley Power:
While I agree with some of what you said, the fact of the matter is ext2 out performs ext4. Mostly because even though ext4 has all of these nifty little pre-allocation for blocks, and inode/block numbering, and even a function in place to mark blocks that are not being used so it knows where exactly to search when a request is made on the disk (this is where that read performance comes in that you speak of)... it is still slower because of journaling. And you still have overhead IO operations. And disabling journaling doesn't fix that entirely, it just makes it more unstable.

HOWEVER... you are still wrong, and whoever debated that ext4 outperforms ext2 on these devices, was also wrong. Let's break this down a bit. So you can understand where my logic is coming from to make that conclusion.

First of all, I will say this, and it is fact. The ONLY reason google switched to ext4 was because they needed a file system that could handle MUCH MUCH larger disks. ext4 has far greater file capacities, and also overall disk capacity than ext2. We are talking exabytes, terabytes, not measily 16 GB devices such as these.

A full odexed ROM on this device, for example, has a total of about 1900 system files, it is less if you are de-odexed (dex files are moved to /data/dalvik-cache). ext2 has an overall file subsystem limit of 32,000, I believe (off memory please correct if I am wrong) and ext4 has some number ridiculously higher than that... I think it is actually 64,000 if I'm not mistaken. Why is this relevant? Because the ONLY reason ext4 has ALLLLLL those cool little extra overkill organizing features is because it is designed to handle data and file clusters that are literally 100 times larger (or even more) than a measily little Android OS that takes up 1.2 GB of space on a 1.7 GB partition :rolleyes: ... ext4 is overkill for these devices and the only reason it is implemented by Samsung and Google is because they want it to be as reliable as possible. The average user will not know how to make a backup, root, or restore a backup if something goes wrong.

ext2 is simple and fast. The fact that it was developed years ago doesn't mean anything. "Improvements" in these types of things are most of the time brought about by some type of demand, not necessarily because it is faster or more efficient. In ext4's case, the demand was larger storage devices and a rock solid stable file system.

If you need another reminder of proof.... again read my reports of boot times and battery life. That should be enough evidence to undo whatever you may have read in the past about what is best for either.

Apply applications and modifications as necessary. I'm not running warehouse full of servers... it's a handheld computer with a very small operating system and disk. ext2 will outshine ext4 in any application like this.

Were I running servers, though, or were I Google.... yeah.... I'd probably be looking at ext4.

Just because the device was delivered to you with this or that, doesn't mean it is the best or fastest in that condition. Variables, again, were developers taking into account the every day user. Thus, they decided on ext4. You and I, are not the every day user.