LMacNeill: Another speed-related question: it’s a 4TB SATA SSD, which isn’t exactly the fastest drive anyway. I think the SATA-3 interface maxes out at a theoretical 600MB/s, and in the real world it’s probably closer to 550 or even 500MB/s. Will ext4 or XFS make that much of a difference on a drive that’s pretty slow to begin with? Or does that make a faster filesystem even more important, because the interface itself is so slow? A bit of both. The final speed of FS operations is a function of many factors, but they can be roughly grouped into: IO-bound: FS A requires more/slower actual IO operations than FS B → FS A is slower CPU/RAM-bound: FS A uses fewer CPU cycles / less RAM than FS B → FS A is faster The IO-bound portion of the equation will scale roughly linearly with hardware IO speed. While the CPU/RAM portion will have greater impact with faster hardware IO speed, likely with some threshold levels above which the difference becomes more and more pronounced. You’d have to run benchmarks against different filesystems on your actual hardware, to really know how much of an impact it will have for your specific configuration.