Major practical differences between ext3 and ext4 - if any?

"EXT4 above all says it will boot your OS faster. Ubuntu 9.04 should be booting up to 30% faster. If this is the only practicall use I would be stunned, since my Ubuntu boxes boot so fast I cannot even go get me a cup of coffee...

But you can use larger harddrives, have larger files, more security is built in to safeguard data from crash and last but not least, it is being optimized for speed...

When starting to develop EXT4 in 2006 it was meant as an improved EXT3. However, changes where to big to just call it an upgrade. Thus the new name. It was added to the kernel in 2008..."

"Short answer: no rush.

Longer answer:

I don't think it's always as simple as ""use the latest release of a file system."" Alos, as pointed out by @nagul, I don't think ext4 is more stable than ext3 at this point.

Even speed difference comparisons are not straightforward. Different file system types tend to perform better in different situations. There's a good linux-mag article that compares several types of file system performance.

One of the major questions you have to ask yourself is does this fs need journaling? I typically setup my machines to use ext2 for /boot and other other partition I mount read only, and /tmp (for speed)."