[plug] Drive Overlays and Linux.

[Patrick Coleman]

On 10/4/06, Lee Jamieson <leejam at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
> Another question, would it be a good idea to format this drive as a
> FAT32 or ext2/3 or even something else?
>
> I understand that the network protocol - Samba - takes care of
> translating from NTFS to whatever (although I don't know how), so
> that's not a problem.  I want to squeeze the last drop of space from
> this drive, so formatting it to something that'll make rocks bleed :)
> is good.

Firstly, I'd stay well clear of FAT32 and NTFS if you're going to be
using the drive exclusively in a linux system. FAT32 is pretty
innefficient with regard to space, not sure about NTFS but its been
reverse-engineered so its not going to be ideal.

Reiserfs is generally considered faster than ext3, but it takes
considerably longer to mount (though this may not be a problem for
you). It does have fast fsck and deletion times (apparently). There
have been some rumors regarding silent data corruption on slightly
flakey hardware, but hey, its fast! :)

ext3 is pretty rock solid, ext2 even more so, but the tradeoff is
speed (especially with ext2). I've also heard good things about XFS,
but I've never tried it.

I'm not sure which is the most efficient with regard to space (it
would be neat to see some benchmarks of say a 200GB drive formatted
with the different filesystems); I suspect it also depends on the
block size specified when you create the filesystem and how you use it
(ie. lots of tiny files or a few large files).

Personally, I use reiserfs for everything, bar the one server where
reiserfs decided it didn't like the data and corrupted a few
(important) files. That one has ext3.

I'd be interested in hearing what other people have to say.

Cheers,

Patrick

-- 
http://www.labyrinthdata.net.au