Linux File Systems MongoDB uses large files for storing data, and preallocates these. These filesystems seem to work well: ext4 ( kernel version >= 2.6.23 ) xfs ( kernel version >= 2.6.25 ) In addition to the file systems above you might also want to (explicitly) disable file/directory modification times by using these mount options: noatime (also enables nodiratime) We have found ext3 to be very