Quoth Jimmy Wu: > I've looked around on Google, and come up with a lot of frustratingly > conflicting advice. That's because file systems are Voodoo. Everyone wants to take part in the discussion, without anyone really understanding what they're talking about. > For example, an article from > debian-administration touts XFS as the best in performance. What would you need FS-performance for? You're not going to host a data base, are you? If it's a personal laptop then performance differences between modern file systems won't be noticable at all. Don't mind those benchmarks, that's all hogwash. Yeah Reiser performs well in some benchmarks, but I've never noticed _any_ difference, instead that takes an awful amount of time to mount it after an unclean unmount. > But other > sites mention that XFS may be more vulnerable to corruption on a > crash/power outage than the other file systems. That is correct, and a reason to avoid it. > Then, people disagree on the performance of ext3 vs ReiserFS. Then again, those people would even disagree on the current local weather. > In an attempt to get some definitive answers, I threw together some of > the statements I've seen, and all I am asking for is verification (a > simple true/false is enough for most of them). > So, here goes: > > (1) ext3 mounts and unmounts slowly, resulting in increased boot times. If you're fighting for seconds and nanoseconds... perhaps. I suggest you stop minding the seconds, though, it's of no good use. When do you need to mount that thing except at boot time? Right, never. And when do you boot? Right, you got a laptop with suspend/resume... my laptop's uptimes frequently make it from one minor kernel revision to the other. > (2) Neither JFS nor XFS can be made smaller, although they can be > extended if needed. Why would you want to modify your laptop's partition table? Your better off not to misuse and abuse that small disk anyways, they tend to have rather short life spans. > (3) JFS performance degrades on larger filesystems, but is least CPU > intensive for smaller file systems. Sure. But who the hell uses JFS on a laptop? > (4) ReiserFS can be flaky on a system crash. Yes, it _will_ be flaky. I've never lost actual data, but that was due to caution and backups. > (5) ReiserFS is the best choice for /var. Arguably, yes. My /var is still Reiser, too. > (6) On a continuum, XFS offers the best performance, ext3 offers the > most data integrity / chances of recovering from a crash, and JFS is > in the middle. And what of all do you need? Right, data integrity. Firefox won't load faster if you're on Reiser4 or Reiser3. It will just be the same. On a laptop, you don't want to lose data, because you're not likely to make backups that often (imagine when you're away for two weeks, on the road with just your laptop). > > (7) Mixing too many file systems in one system will degrade performance Yes. And there's no need mixing fs' on a laptop, either. > > (8) Is there any advantage to using ext2 for /boot rather than ext3? There is no advantage in using /boot altogether. Really, use ext3 for /home and choose freely for the other stuff. You're free to experiment, but don't experiment with your personal data. Nothing but _HEADACHE_, pure old brain-torturing headache will come from losing personal data. Aleks
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