20 years ago is 2004, not the 90s. I don't know, but it's certainly possible that one of them was in the lead in 1995, a different one in 2005, and a different one in 2015. This is especially plausible because Linux was only created in the mid 90s, so those first few years seem likely to have been disproportionately rough.
NTFS might have been rock reliable in Windows NT and perhaps also in Windows 2000.
When Windows XP has been launched, NTFS was certainly much less reliable. Even without being affected by any crashes or other anomalies, the free space on the NTFS partitions of early Windows XP computers would shrink steadily, without any apparent cause, requiring a reformatting/reinstallation after some time.
Early Windows XP was very buggy. While a computer with Windows XP did not require one or more reboots per day like one with Windows 98, failing to reboot it for more than a few days guaranteed a crash.
Only after installing several massive service packs in the following years, Windows XP has become reasonably stable.
I live in a developing country. We have constant power blackouts, like every day. Anything not journalling cannot survive that yteatment. Even crappiest XP was better than UFS which absolutely sucked in that respect.
For me, in the 90s ext2 was much, much reliable than ntfs. After a power failure ext2 will just run fsck and fix the filesystem while ntfs will sometimes give up.
I don't know if it was a file system related thing but you could bet on the Windows registry being borked beyond repair after just a handful of unexpected power cycles.
No. We had a NT4 server, handful FreeBSDs and one Linux. After several blackouts FreeBSD would lose file or two. NT4 workstation had no problems either, neither with registry nor FS.
Windows 2000 was stable as a rock, NTFS included. Never had an issue with it.
Windows XP was more stable than 98SE, but it did crash more, because it was a general purpose OS used by people playing games. Still can't recall any major NTFS issues with it.
Windows 2000 with XP drivers (edit the INI file to allow it to install) was the way to go ;)
