List of file systems


The following lists identify, characterize, and link to more thorough information on 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.

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.

File systems with built-in fault-tolerance

These file systems have built-in checksumming and either mirroring or parity for extra redundancy on one or several block devices:

File systems optimized for flash memory, solid state media

Solid state media, such as flash memory, are similar to disks in their interfaces, but have different problems. At low level, they require special handling such as wear leveling and different error detection and correction algorithms. Typically a device such as a solid-state drive handles such operations internally and therefore a regular file system can be used. However, for certain specialized installations a file system optimized for plain flash memory is advantageous.
Many, but not all, file systems optimized for flash memory support TRIM commands to tell the storage device that certain blocks are no longer in use and can be reused.
  • 3FS – is a File System made by DeepSeek designed for AI Training and Inference workloads.
  • APFS – Apple File System is a next-generation file system for Apple products.
  • CHFS – a NetBSD filesystem for embedded systems optimised for raw flash media.
  • exFAT – Microsoft file system intended for flash cards. Does not support TRIM on Windows. Supports TRIM on Linux.
  • ExtremeFFS – internal filesystem for SSDs.
  • F2FS – Flash-Friendly File System. An open source Linux file system introduced by Samsung in 2012.
  • FFS2, one of the earliest flash file systems. Developed and patented by Microsoft in the early 1990s.
  • JFFS – original log structured Linux file system for NOR flash media.
  • JFFS2 – successor of JFFS, for NAND and NOR flash.
  • LSFS – a Log-structured file system with writable snapshots and inline data deduplication created by StarWind Software. Uses DRAM and flash to cache spinning disks.
  • LogFS – intended to replace JFFS2, better scalability. No longer under active development.
  • NILFS – a log-structured file system for Linux with continuous snapshots.
  • Non-Volatile File System – the system for flash memory introduced by Palm, Inc.
  • NOVA – the "non-volatile memory accelerated" file system for persistent main memory.
  • OneFS – a filesystem utilized by Isilon. It supports selective placement of meta-data directly onto flash SSD.
  • - a proprietary flash file system by Tuxera with high resilience and built-in data integrity. This file system is best suited for embedded applications requiring heavy data workloads over long-term operations. Reliance Velocity can used for all block based media like eMMC, UFS, eSD, SD card, CF card, and SSD. It is compatible for Linux, Android and QNX with portability to other embedded operating systems.
  • - a proprietary file system by Tuxera for resource-constrained embedded systems. It has built-in data integrity with copy-on-write transactional technology and deterministic operations. This file system can be used for block based media and is configurable for Small POSIX, Full POSIX and can be ported to many RTOS environments. Tuxera has a certified version of this file system called . The source code of Reliance Assure is complaint to MISRA C and developed following the ASPICE framework.
  • Segger Microcontroller Systems emFile – filesystem for deeply embedded applications which supports both NAND and NOR flash. Wear leveling, fast read and write, and very low RAM usage.
  • SPIFFS – SPI Flash File System, a wear-leveling filesystem intended for small NOR flash devices.
  • TFAT – a transactional version of the FAT filesystem.
  • TrueFFS – internal file system for SSDs, implementing error correction, bad block re-mapping and wear-leveling.
  • UBIFS – successor of JFFS2, optimized to utilize NAND and NOR flash.
  • Write Anywhere File Layout – an internal journaling file system utilized by NetApp within their DataONTAP OS, originally designed to use hard disk drives. WAFL uses RAID-DP to protect against multiple disk failures and non-volatile DRAM for transaction logging of file system changes.
  • YAFFS – a log-structured file system designed for NAND flash, but also used with NOR flash.
  • – a little fail-safe filesystem designed for microcontrollers.
  • JesFS – Jo's embedded serial FileSystem. A very small footprint and robust filesystem, designed for very small microcontroller. Open Source and licensed under GPL v3.

File systems not directly advertised as flash friendly but that support TRIM in major implementations

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.

Shared-disk file systems

Shared-disk file systems are primarily used in a storage area network where all nodes directly access the block storage where the file system is located. This makes it possible for nodes to fail without affecting access to the file system from the other nodes. Shared-disk file systems are normally used in a high-availability cluster together with storage on hardware RAID. Shared-disk file systems normally do not scale over 64 or 128 nodes.
Shared-disk file systems may be symmetric where metadata is distributed among the nodes or asymmetric with centralized metadata servers.

Distributed file systems

Distributed file systems are also called network file systems. Many implementations have been made, they are location dependent and they have access control lists, unless otherwise stated below.

Distributed fault-tolerant file systems

Distributed fault-tolerant replication of data between nodes for high availability and offline operation.

Distributed parallel file systems

Distributed parallel file systems stripe data over multiple servers for high performance. They are normally used in high-performance computing (HPC).
Some of the distributed parallel file systems use an object storage device for chunks of data together with centralized metadata servers.
  • BeeGFS is a hardware-independent parallel file system that features distributed metadata and striping of files across multiple targets, such as NVMe devices or logical volumes.
  • Lustre is an open-source high-performance distributed parallel file system for Linux, used on many of the largest computers in the world.
  • Parallel Virtual File System. Developed to store virtual system images, with a focus on non-shared writing optimizations. Available for Linux under GPL.

Distributed parallel fault-tolerant file systems

Distributed file systems, which also are parallel and fault tolerant, stripe and replicate data over multiple servers for high performance and to maintain data integrity. Even if a server fails no data is lost. The file systems are used in both high-performance computing (HPC) and high-availability clusters.
All file systems listed here focus on high availability, scalability and high performance unless otherwise stated below.
NameByLicenseOSDescription
AlluxioUC Berkeley, AlluxioApache LicenseCross-platformAn open-source virtual distributed file system.
BeeGFS Fraunhofer SocietyGNU GPL v2 for client, other components are proprietaryLinuxA free to use file system with optional professional support, designed for easy usage and high performance, used on some of the fastest computer clusters in the world. BeeGFS allows replication of storage volumes with automatic failover and self-healing.
CephFSInktank Storage, a company acquired by Red HatGNU LGPLLinux kernel, FreeBSD via FUSEA massively scalable object store. CephFS was merged into the Linux kernel in 2010. Ceph's foundation is the reliable autonomic distributed object store, which provides object storage via programmatic interface and S3 or Swift REST APIs, block storage to QEMU/KVM/Linux hosts, and POSIX filesystem storage which can be mounted by Linux kernel and FUSE clients.
Chiron FSGNU GPL v3LinuxA FUSE-based, transparent replication file system, layering on an existing file system and implementing at the file system level what RAID 1 does at the device level. A notably convenient consequence is the possibility of picking single target directories, without the need of replicating entire partitions.
CloudStoreKosmixApache LicenseGoogle File System workalike. Replaced by Quantcast File System (QFS)
dCacheDESY and othersProprietary LinuxA write once filesystem, accessible via various protocols.
General Parallel File System IBMProprietaryLinux, Windows and AIXA POSIX-compliant, high-performance, parallel file system. Support synchronous replication between attached block storage, and asynchronous replication to remote filesystems. Also support erasure coding on dual homed SAS attached storage, and distributed over multiple storage nodes.
Gfarm file systemX11 LicenseLinux, macOS, FreeBSD, NetBSD and SolarisUses PostgreSQL for metadata and FUSE for mounting.
GlusterFSGluster, a company acquired by Red HatGNU GPL v3Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenSolarisA general purpose distributed file system for scalable storage. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. GlusterFS is the main component in Red Hat Storage Server.
Google File System GoogleInternal softwareFocus on fault tolerance, high throughput and scalability.
Hadoop Distributed File SystemApache Software FoundationApache LicenseCross-platformOpen source GoogleFS clone.
IBRIX FusionIBRIXProprietary
JuicedataApache LicenseCross-platformAn open-source POSIX-compliant file system built on top of Redis and object storage, designed and optimized for cloud native environment.
LizardFSSkytechnologyGNU GPL v3Cross-platformAn open source, highly available POSIX-compliant file system that supports Windows clients.
LustreOriginally developed by Cluster File Systems and currently supported by OpenSFSGNU GPL v2 & LGPLLinuxA POSIX-compliant, high-performance filesystem used on a majority of systems in the Top-500 list of HPC systems. Lustre has high availability via storage failover.
MapR FSMapRProprietaryLinuxHighly scalable, POSIX compliant, fault tolerant, read/write filesystem with a distributed, fault tolerant metadata service. It provides an HDFS and NFS interface to clients as well as a noSQL table interface and Apache Kafka compatible messaging system.
MooseFSCore TechnologyGNU GPL v2 and proprietaryCross-platform A fault tolerant, highly available and high performance scale-out network distributed file system. It spreads data over several physical commodity x86 servers, which are visible to the user as one namespace. For standard file operations MooseFS acts like any other Unix-like file systems.
ObjectiveFSObjective Security CorporationProprietaryLinux, macOSPOSIX-compliant shared distributed filesystem. Uses object store as a backend. Runs on AWS S3, GCS and object store devices.
OneFS distributed file systemIsilonProprietaryFreeBSDBSD-based OS on dedicated Intel based hardware, serving NFS v3 and SMB/CIFS to Windows, macOS, Linux and other UNIX clients under a proprietary software.
OIO-FSOpenIOProprietaryLinuxOIO-FS provides file-oriented access to OpenIO SDS object storage backend. It is based on FUSE technology and presents a POSIX file system to users. This access can be used locally, or over a network using NFS or SMB.
PanFSVDURAProprietaryLinux, macOS, FreeBSDA POSIX-compliant, high-performance, parallel file system used by HPC clusters. It uses erasure coding and snapshots for data protection, is based upon a scale-out object store, and is focused on transparent failure recovery and ease of use.
ProprietaryLinux, macOS, FreeBSDA fault-tolerant, parallel POSIX file system, with block and object interfaces, and advanced enterprise features like multi-tenancy, strong authentication, encryption. Split-brain safe fault-tolerance is achieved through Paxos-based leader election and erasure coding.
RozoFSRozo SystemsGNU GPL v2LinuxA POSIX DFS focused on fault-tolerance and high-performance, based on the Mojette erasure code to reduce significantly the amount of redundancy.
ScalityScality ringProprietaryLinuxA POSIX file system focused on high availability and performance. Also provides S3/REST/NFS interfaces.
Tahoe-LAFSTahoe-LAFS Software FoundationGNU GPL v2+ and otherLinux, Windows, macOSA secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant, peer-to-peer distributed data store and distributed file system.
XtreemFSContrail E.U. project, the German MoSGrid project and the German project "First We Take Berlin"BSD 3-ClauseLinux, Solaris, macOS, WindowsA cross-platform file system for wide area networks. It replicates the data for fault tolerance and caches metadata and data to improve performance over high-latency links. SSL and X.509 certificates support makes XtreemFS usable over public networks. It also supports striping for usage in a cluster.

In development:

Peer-to-peer file systems

Some of these may be called cooperative storage cloud.

Special-purpose file systems

Pseudo file systems

  • devfs – a virtual file system in Unix-like operating systems for managing device nodes on-the-fly
  • procfs – a pseudo-file system, used to access kernel information about processes
  • tmpfs – in-memory temporary file system
  • sysfs – a virtual file system in Linux holding information about buses, devices, firmware, filesystems, etc.
  • debugfs – a virtual file system in Linux for accessing and controlling kernel debugging
  • configfs – a writable file system used to configure various kernel components of Linux
  • sysctlfs – allow accessing sysctl nodes via a file system; available on NetBSD via PUFFS, FreeBSD kernel via a 3rd-party module, and Linux as a part of Linux procfs.
  • kernfs – a file system found on some BSD systems that provides access to some kernel state variables; similar to sysctlfs, Linux procfs and Linux sysfs.
  • WinFS - Uses a relational database to manage files
  • wikifs – a server application for Plan 9's virtual, wiki, file system

Encrypted file systems

File system interfaces

These are not really file systems; they allow access to file systems from an operating system standpoint.