Ext2 Vs ext3

Ext3 filesystem is nothing but next version of ext2 filesystem with journaling support. Ext3 has been structurally implemented same as ext2 so they have same data structures. he most important difference between Ext2 and Ext3 is that Ext3 supports journaling which allows fast recovery from disk problems. You also get reliability and a better performance with ext3. Ext3 is designed to take care of both metadata and data.

Ext3 is a tiny bit slower than ext2 is, but it holds tremendous advantages. There is really only one difference between ext2 and ext3, and that is that ext3 uses a journal to prevent filesystem corruption in the case of an unclean shutdown (ie. before the filesystem is synced to disk). That makes ext3 a bit slower than ext2 since all metadata changes are written to the journal, and then flushed to disk, but on the other hand you don't risk having the entire filesystem destroyed at power failure or if an unwitted person turns the computer off uncleanly.