[Tfug] Filesystem suggestion

[Ammon Lauritzen]

My most recent experience is that xfs is still probably the best
option generally available. It -is- rock solid and has good tools. The
biggest downsides I've encountered are all little things like Red
Hat's (and by extension CentOS's) refusal to ship with it and parted's
lack of explicit support.

I don't have the bonnie tests I took earlier this year on hand, but I
remember being pleasantly surprised by the gain over ext3 on the same
hardware. I've never run ext4 in production.

I have heard good things about btrfs (features >= zfs, performance >=
xfs) but haven't played with it and don't think it is stable enough
for prime time yet.

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 8:11 PM, John Gruenenfelder
<johng at as.arizona.edu> wrote:
> Greetings all,
>
> First, to Malcolm's "hell" response: very well said.  To the point without
> being insulting.
>
>
> Anyway, for something OT (that's On Topic this time)... I'm looking for some
> real world suggestions for a filesystem to use on my desktop PC.
>
> For many years now I've been using XFS.  It's rock solid, threaded (so I've
> read) and apparently fast.  Only once since I've been using it have I ever had
> an filesystem corruption, and that was after an abrupt power outage caused by,
> of all things, my UPS.  It's log does not guarantee data integrity, but it's
> very good at keeping the filesystem from being hosed.  I also very much enjoy
> never ever having to fsck the system, because it's always doing minor checks
> to make sure the FS is sound.
>
> At the time I began using XFS, it was by far the most advanced.  But now?
> I've seen many benchmarks, and it still ranks well, but I'm looking for some
> real world uses here.  What do you use?  What do you have to compare it with
> and how well does it work?
>
> The situation:  Very shortly now I will be upgrading my desktop PC.  Part of
> that entails replacing my small several year old SATA drive with two 1TB SATA
> (running at either SATA2 or 3 speeds) in a RAID-0 striping configuration.  I'm
> mostly just looking for speed and a snappy system.  Backing up of data is done
> by putting things on my file server which has a nice RAID-5 array running
> right now, plus any copies I've made elsewhere or uploaded to other machines.
> So I'm not too worried that this configuration will cause doom.  I'm probably
> going to use the old drive as a backup drive, as well, since I have an easy to
> use eSATA harddrive dock on my desk.
>
> Of course, I don't *need* 2TB of space.  I suppose I could get the same read
> performance from a RAID-1 array, correct?  That's doable too.
>
> So, what would you suggest for filesystem and drive arrangement?  BTW, even
> those most every MB has some sort of RAID "hardware" on it, I'll just be using
> the Linux kernel RAID as I'm familiar with it and it works fine, even though
> it means that my small Windows partition won't be able to partake of the RAID
> speed up.  Everything I've ever read on this list says those MB RAID solutions
> are not very good (although if anybody has something to say contrary to that,
> I'd like to hear that, too).
>
>
> --
> --John Gruenenfelder    Systems Manager, MKS Imaging Technology, LLC.
> Try Weasel Reader for PalmOS  --  http://weaselreader.org
> "This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood
> of my enemies!"
>        --Sam of Sam & Max
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
> Subscription Options:
> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>



-- 
Ammon Lauritzen