[plug] What does public opion feel about Riser FS?

[Craig Ringer]

> My filesystem experience in order from least catastrophes to most:
> MIT Athena AFS (0 catastrophes)
> SGI XFS (on SGI) (0 catastrophes)
> MS NTFS (1 catastrophe)
> ReiserFS (1 catastrophe)
> HFS+ (Mac OS8-9) (2 catastrophes)
> ext3 (2 catastrophes)
> ext2 (3 catastrophes) 
> FAT16/32 (DOS/Win9x) (3 catastrophes)

Wow. I literally can't count the number of FAT32 catastrophes I've 
encountered, either personally or checking out a problem with a friend. 
At least 10... I remember one with a directory that clearly used to be 
the 'doze directory - but now had a name containing ASCII smilies and 
all sorts of other worrying chars. There's no guarantee that some 
weren't hardware faults... but the same hardware generally kept on 
working fine afterwards and tested OK.

As for ext2/ext3/reiserfs, I have had failures but all have turned out 
to be disk controller or hard disk problems in the end. Hopefully it'll 
stay that way.

I managed to make a reiser4 FS, but a mount attempt resulted in a kernel 
panic and required a reboot. Then again, I was playing with 2.5.-early.

HFS/HFS+ would have to take the cake for me as "least reliable 
filesystem ever." Its amazing. Perhaps its just our macs 
(Quark+MacOS9+network=crashintosh) given that they get reset 2-4 times 
daily, but I have the most apalling HFS/HFS+ corruption problems. I'm 
counting 10 + cases of severe corruption requiring reformat+reinstall, 
and that's on a lab of 7 macs. Compare to even our win98 boxes, in which 
I haven't lost even one to FS corruption.

NTFS has never failed on me. Come to think of it, neither NT4 or 2k have 
totally crapped out on me either - I've had to reinstall to make them 
work properly (scorched earth) but never encountered any FS corruption.

I've never been game enough to try the linux XFS port...

Craig