The following lists identify, characterize and link to more thorough 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.
Disk file systems
Disk file systems are usually block-oriented. Files in a block-oriented file system are sequences of blocks, often featuring fully random-access read, write, and modify operations.
- ADFS – Acorn's Advanced Disc filing system, successor to DFS.
- AdvFS - Advanced File System, designed by Digital Equipment Corporation for their Digital UNIX/Tru64 UNIX operating system.
- AFS (Not to be confused with Andrew File System, below) – Acer Fast Filesystem, used on SCO OpenServer
- AthFS - AtheOS File System, a 64-bit journaled filesystem now used by Syllable. Also called AFS
- AFS - Ami File Safe, a commercial filesystem shipped on Amiga in the 90's (AFS is structure compatible with PFS)
- BFS – the Be File System used on BeOS, occasionally misnamed as BeFS. Open source implementation called OpenBFS is used by the Haiku Operating System.
- Btrfs - is a copy-on-write file system for Linux announced by Oracle in 2007 and published under the GNU General Public License (GPL).
- CBMFS – The filesystem used on most Commodore 64-compatible floppy drives including the venerable 1541.
- CMDFS – A filesystem extension added to CBMFS by Creative Micro Designs, for use in their 3.5 inch floppy drives, RAM disks, and hard drive controllers.
- DTFS – Desktop File System, featuring file compression, used by SCO OpenServer
- DOS 3.x - Original floppy operating system and file system developed for the Apple II
- EAFS – Extended Acer Fast Filesystem, used on SCO OpenServer
- Extent File System (EFS) – an older block filing system under IRIX.
- ext – Extended file system, designed for Linux systems
- ext2 – Second extended file system, designed for Linux systems.
- ext3 – A journaled form of ext2.
- ext4 – A follow up for ext3 and also a journaled filesystem with support for extents.
- ext3cow – A versioning file system form of ext3.
- FAT – File Allocation Table, used on DOS and Microsoft Windows, 12-, 16- and 32-bit table depths.
- VFAT – Version of Microsoft Windows FAT system with extension to allow long (up to 255 character) filenames instead of only the 8.3 filenames allowed in the original FAT.
- FATX – A modified version of Microsoft Windows FAT system that is used on the original Xbox console.
- FFS (Amiga) – Fast File System, used on Amiga systems. This FS has evolved over time. Now counts FFS1, FFS Intl, FFS DCache, FFS2.
- FFS – Fast File System, used on *BSD systems
- Fossil – Plan 9 from Bell Labs snapshot archival file system.
- Files-11 – OpenVMS file system; also used on some PDP-11 systems; supports record-orientated files
- HFS – Hierarchical File System, used on older Mac OS systems. Successor to Macintosh File System (MFS) and predecessor to HFS+; not to be confused with IBM's HFS provided with z/OS
- HFS Plus – Updated version of HFS, used on newer Mac OS systems. Also called HFS+ . Recent versions allow journaling.
- HPFS – High Performance File System, used on OS/2
- HTFS – High Throughput Filesystem, used on SCO OpenServer
- ISO 9660 – Used on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM discs (Rock Ridge and Joliet are extensions to this)
- JFS – IBM Journaling file system, provided in Linux, OS/2, and AIX. Supports extents.
- JXFS used in AmigaOS 4.1.
- |LisaFS - Filesystem used by Apple Lisa's operating system. Unique in that it allowed two different files with exactly same name ("foo" and "foo").
- LFS – 4.4BSD implementation of a log-structured file system
- MFS – Macintosh File System, used on early Mac OS systems. Succeeded by Hierarchical File System (HFS).
- MFS – TiVo's Media File System, a proprietary fault tolerant format used on Tivo hard drives for real time recording from live TV.
- Minix file system – Used on Minix systems
- NILFS – Linux implementation of a log-structured file system
- NTFS – (NT File System) Used on Microsoft's Windows NT-based operating systems
- NetWare File System - The original NetWare 2.x - 5.x file system, used optionally by later versions.
- NSS – Novell Storage Services. This is a new 64-bit journaling file system using a balanced tree algorithm. Used in NetWare versions 5.0-up and recently ported to Linux.
- OFS – Old File System, on Amiga. Nice for floppies, but fairly useless on hard drives.
- PFS – and PFS2, PFS3, etc. Technically interesting file system available for the Amiga, performs very well under a lot of circumstances. Very simple and elegant.
- ProDOS - Operating system and file system successor to Apple's DOS 3.x, used with the Apple II series including the IIgs
- Qnx4fs - File system that is used in QNX version 4 and 6.
- Qnx6fs - New file system available in QNX 6.4.0.
- ReiserFS – File system that uses journaling
- Reiser4 – File system that uses journaling, newest version of ReiserFS
- S51K – AT&T UNIX System V 1KB Filesystem, used by SCO OpenServer
- SkyFS - Developed for SkyOS to replace BFS as the operating system's main file system. It is based on BFS, but contains many new features.
- SFS – Smart File System, journaling file system available for the Amiga platforms.
- SpadFS - Linux - non-journaling, hashing lookup
- STL (standard language file system) - a file system developed by IBM .
- Tux3 - An experimental versioning file system intended as a replacement for ext3
- UDF – Packet based file system for WORM/RW media such as CD-RW and DVD.
- UFS – Unix File System, used on Solaris and older BSD systems
- UFS2 – Unix File System, used on newer BSD systems
- VxFS Veritas file system, first commercial journaling file system; HP-UX, Solaris, Linux, AIX
- VLIR (Variable Length Indexed Record) – a filesystem extension added by Berkeley Softworks to CBMFS, allowing full random access read and write operations, for computers running GEOS.
- WAFL – Write Anywhere File Layout. High performance, log-structured like file system. WAFL uses RAID-DP to protect against multiple disk failures, and NVRAM for transaction log replays. Used on NetApp systems
- XFS – Used on SGI IRIX and Linux systems
- zFS - used on IBM zSeries systems.
File systems with built in fault tolerance
These file systems has built in checksumming and either mirroring or parity for extra redundancy on one or several block devices.
- Btrfs - A filesystem based on B-Trees, created by Oracle Corporation.
- ZFS – Used on Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris, ported to FreeBSD 7.0 and to FUSE (not to be confused with the two zFSes from IBM)
File systems optimized for flash memory / solid state media
Main article: Flash file systemSolid state media, like flash memory, are similar to disks in their interfaces, but have different problems. While eliminating seek times, they require special handling such as wear leveling and different error detection and correction algorithms.
- FFS2 (presumably preceded by FFS1), one of the earliest flash file systems. Developed and patented by Microsoft in the early 1990s.
- exFAT - Microsoft proprietary system intended for flash drives but often called FAT64 - limit of 2 64 bytes (16 Exabytes)
- TFAT – A transactional version of the FAT filesystem.
- JFFS – Original log structured Linux file system for NOR flash media
- JFFS2 – Successor of JFFS, for NAND and NOR flash
- LogFS – Intended to replace JFFS2, better scalability. In early development.
- Non-Volatile File System -- the "non-volatile file system" for flash memory introduced by Palm, Inc..
- UBIFS – Successor of JFFS2
- YAFFS – A Log structured file system designed for NAND flash, but also used with NOR flash.
- ETFS - Embedded Transactional File System. Designed primarily for NAND devices by QNX Software Systems.
- TrueFFS - Internal file system for SSDs, implementing error correction, bad block re-mapping and wear levelling.
- ExtremeFFS - Internal file system for SSDs.
Record-oriented file systems
In Record-oriented file systems files are stored as a collection of records. They are typically associated with 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. The more sophisticated record-oriented file systems have more in common with simple databases than with other file systems.
- Files-11 – early versions were record-oriented; support for "streams" was added later
- OS4000 for GEC's OS4000 operating system, on the GEC 4000 series minicomputers
- Queued sequential access method (QSAM) – also for IBM's z/OS and z/VSE operating systems; see Access methods and Data set (IBM mainframe) for more examples
- RSD (record sequential delimited) - A record-oriented file system from IBM
- Structured File Server (SFS) — A record-oriented file system from IBM, originally part of the Encina system, now integrated into CICS Transaction Server. <
JFS for Linux
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