[plug] Drive Overlays and Linux.

[Shannon Carver]

Heh, the filesystem Debate!

In the past I've stuck this rule:

Mission Critical (Routers/Firewalls or boxes that aren't storing/moving a
lot of data)/Boot Partitions: ext2/ext3
Desktop/Laptop/Mass Storage: ReiserFS

I've recently been doing some reading on XFS though, which apparently is
fantastic for large files/movies/videos, and have heard success stories from
people running reiserfs for OS/Programs/Small files storage and XFS for
large storage spread across different partitions and disks.

It's all personal choice really though, many distro's default to reiserFS as
opposed to ext2/3 as they used to so its probably just best to try a few and
see what suits you.

I'm not sure of the name of the Sun (???), might have been JFS?  Someone was
raving about it recently on the Plug list, and from what I can remember it
was a step in the database filesystem direction (What WinFS was supposed to
be).

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-bounces at plug.org.au [mailto:plug-bounces at plug.org.au] On Behalf
> Of Patrick Coleman
> Sent: Wednesday, 4 October 2006 2:49 PM
> To: plug at plug.org.au
> Subject: Re: [plug] Drive Overlays and Linux.
> 
> 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
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