Generally speaking, most Android phones use EXT4 file system, but this year Samsung Galaxy Note 10 series uses F2FS file system and UFS 3.0. The F2FS file system used by the Emperor has its own unique features. What are the benefits of the F2FS file system?
What is the F2FS file system?
First of all, what is the file system? In short, the role of the file system is to determine how to store and retrieve data in local storage. The Android operating system has traditionally used the EXT4 file system. Although mobile phones such as One Plus 3T are the first to try to use the newer F2FS file system, their successor flagship model uses the EXT4 system. The F2FS file system was launched in 2012 and is called “Flash Friendly File System”. This is a file system specially created for flash memory. The first stable version of the EXT4 file system was released in 2008 as a direct successor to EXT3. The advantage of F2FS is that the transfer rate of small files is faster. However, the problem is also obvious, that is, the space occupied by the file has become larger and the potential file compatibility problem.
What is the difference between F2FS and EXT4: speed and stability
EXT4 is considered to be more stable than F2FS because the former technology is very mature and does not make major changes to the underlying structure. However, F2FS’s optimization of mobile phone processor performance is also very obvious, which is a more difficult choice for the Android platform, because Android phones are more “eat hardware configuration”, and fragmentation is also a major problem. (So follow up with EROFS)
However, F2FS is a log-structured file system created primarily for NAND flash, and it is more popular on high-end phones, and it runs at a very fast rate. With the continuous development of technology, the existing F2FS is becoming more stable, especially under the conditions of UFS 3.0, and its advantages are slowly being discovered. It seems that Samsung is also trying to gradually transition to the F2FS file system.
Small example: One plus 7 Pro has the same UFS 3.0 storage standard as the Galaxy Note 10, but the former uses the EXT4 file system instead of F2FS. The test results show that the Galaxy Note 10 performs better than the one plus 7 Pro in terms of random and SQLite write speed. It seems that the new file system may be applied more widely in the future.
If the F2FS file system work better, than future flagship phone will use it.
