[plug] Filesystems for lots of inodes

[Brad Campbell]

On 2/2/20 2:42 pm, Brad Campbell wrote:

> It would appear xfs destroys ext4 for this perverse use case.
> 
> I suppose my next step is migrating the system across to xfs and if I take the time to copy the whole thing across, probably foregoing a couple of nights backups or just start a new drive from scratch and put the current ext4 drive in the safe for a couple of months.
> 

Just to follow this up. A day or so after I sent that mail I set up a new external USB 4TB hard disk with a clean xfs filesystem and started building the backups onto it.
It didn't make a jot of difference to the backup speed. I resigned myself to this just being a poor design decision and as the speed is not actually a problem in real life I'd just suck it up and leave it be.

Fast forward a couple of months and I had another look.

Drive model number : ST4000DM004-2CV104

Yep, it's SMR and this workload is entirely small distant and random read/writes.

Oh well, I'll use it until it fails. By that time the cost of 4TB ssd's will have come down and I can replace it with something with better random performance.

Brad