Ext4 is designed to provide better performance and increase reliability. It also increases the maximum filesystem size to one exabyte and reduces the amount of time that is required to perform a fsck operation.

Linux hardware site Phoronix has released benchmarks Ext4 performance testing that was conducted with a solid-state drive. The most impressive results can be seen in the IOzone test, which measures write performance for a large file. In this test, Ext4 annihilated the competition and significantly outperformed XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, and Ext3. The new filesystem also outpaced its peers in the Intel IOMeter File Server Access Pattern Test.