The following lists identify, characterize, and link to more thorough information on file systems. Many older operating systems support only their one "native" file system, which does not bear any name apart from the name of the operating system itself.

Disk file systems are usually block-oriented. Files in a block-oriented file system are sequences of blocks, often featuring fully random-access read, write, and modify operations.

These file systems have built-in checksumming and either mirroring or parity for extra redundancy on one or several block devices:

Solid state media, such as flash memory, are similar to disks in their interfaces, but have different problems. At low level, they require special handling such as wear leveling and different error detection and correction algorithms. Typically a device such as a solid-state drive handles such operations internally and therefore a regular file system can be used. However, for certain specialized installations (embedded systems, industrial applications) a file system optimized for plain flash memory is advantageous.

Many, but not all, file systems optimized for flash memory support TRIM commands to tell the storage device that certain blocks are no longer in use and can be reused.

In record-oriented file systems files are stored as a collection of records. They are typically associated with mainframe and minicomputer operating systems. Programs read and write whole records, rather than bytes or arbitrary byte ranges, and can seek to a record boundary but not within records. The more sophisticated record-oriented file systems have more in common with simple databases than with other file systems.

Shared-disk file systems (also called shared-storage file systems, SAN file system, Clustered file system or even cluster file systems) are primarily used in a storage area network where all nodes directly access the block storage where the file system is located. This makes it possible for nodes to fail without affecting access to the file system from the other nodes. Shared-disk file systems are normally used in a high-availability cluster together with storage on hardware RAID. Shared-disk file systems normally do not scale over 64 or 128 nodes.

Shared-disk file systems may be symmetric where metadata is distributed among the nodes or asymmetric with centralized metadata servers.