Re: Filesystem recommendations
On 4/24/2010 10:53 AM, B. Alexander wrote:
Hi,
I have a question on filesystems. Back in the day, I started using
reiser3. It was faster than ext3, and it could be extended without
umounting the filesystem (which has since been fixed in ext3), plus,
unlike any filesystem I have encountered, it could be reduced in size.
Well, now reiser3 is very long in the tooth, reiser4 will probably
never go anywhere, so I'm wondering what filesystems are recommended.
Last I heard, ext4 is stablizing, but it had problems with filesystem
corruption, though that was mid-fall last year, IIRC.
So now, I would like to slowly start replacing my reiser3 partitions
with...something else. There are two options, the old standards, e.g.
ext3/4, xfs, etc, and then there are a slew of new filesystems, such
as nilfs2, btrfs and exofs.
I'm talking about a range of machines, from workstations to servers to
NFS and storage servers with multi-terabyte disks, and a backup server
with several hundred gigs of backups.
Does anyone have suggestions and practical experience with the pros
and cons of the various filesystems?
Thanks,
--b
If file integrity are important to you, look for a FS that keeps
checksums of individual files. Otherwise, if a file becomes corrupted,
you'll never know it, unless you keep your own checksums. There are
only a small handful of filesystems that keep checksums of your files.
Btrfs and ZFS come to mind. I believe ZFS is more mature than Btrfs,
but it isn't in the kernel. I believe the only way to get ZFS on Linux
is through FUSE.
There's also JFS, which has been around for a number of years, and is
mature. It doesn't checksum your files, but it does use copy-on-write
(as do Btrfs and ZFS), which goes a long way to keeping your data from
getting corrupted, something XFS does not do.
So if Btrfs were more mature, or if ZFS were included in the kernel, I'd
recommend either of those. But as it is, I think JFS is the way to go.
-- Kevin
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