| No. | Workload property | Ext3 | Esext3 |
| 1 | File and Directory count | Single file per scan | Many files and Directories |
| Directory tree deepness | Often deeply nested directories | Low and Homogeneous | |
| File size | Incline towards many small files | Multi-gigabyte disk image files | |
| 2 | Meta-data operations | Lowest (40%) | Many (72%) |
| 3 | I/O synchronization | Asynchronous and synchronization | Asynchronous and synchronization |
| 4 | In-file randomness | Workload-dependent | Workload-dependent |
| Cross-file randomness | Workload-dependent | Workload-dependent | |
| 5 | I/O size | Workload-dependent | Workload-dependent |
| 6 | Read-modify-write | Infrequent | Infrequent |
| 7 | Processing time | Workload-dependent | Increased because of manual XOR checksum |