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

[indy at THE-TECH.MIT.EDU]

On Wed, May 21, 2003 at 07:55:51PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> 
> 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.

<shrug> I've always been on the low end of catastrophes.


> 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.

That's fascinating to me Craig, you've mentioned this before. When
I was involved with a couple of newspaper setups Quark was equally
unreliable although I was involved more with the Photoshop machines
(don't mention Colorsync ;) ).

I have to say, dealing with networked installations of 12 - 20 Macs
that I have not had the problems you have. I'd be curious to chat
wiht you about it, so drop me a line off list if you feel like it.

> 
> 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.

<rant> Me too. One of the things that's always bothered me about
"Linux Zealots" is they seem to have been blind over the years to
the ups and downs of ext2.
</rant>

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

I haven't had the guts to try it on a production system I must admit.
Playing with it I've had no problems, but others report quite a few.
The IRIX version of XFS was the best (non-distributed) fs I ever used,
solid, decent for small files and amazing with large ones. 

I still hold out hope that the Linux port will stabilize quickly enough
to get a "decent hearing" in the marketplace. Future versions of reiser
hold out the promise of BeOS style db-related functions in the FS, which
may be revolutionary, but until then a stable XFS would be quite attractive.


Indy.


-- 
Indranath Neogy
<indy at the-tech.mit.edu>