On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 1:56 AM, Anders Norrbring
I know.. This has been chewed in articles over and over.. But what are your personal, subjective, feelings about file systems?
I want to run something that is fast for use as a system partition, pretty "tolerant" to crashes from disasters like power outages etc.
The system partition will reside on a Adaptec RAID-5.
I'm currently looking at ext3, ReiserFS and XFS. ReiserFS has always served me good, but as you all know, support and development is going downhill. Ext3 hasn't made itself famous for being fast, and XFS is still a "gray matter" in my world..
Grateful for any ideas!
Anders.
Ignoring speed, I _assume_ the safest is ext3 with the rarely used data-journaling option. A journal is like a FIFO maintained on its own physically separate portion of the disk where the OS writes things like: I am going to update the files with XX content. After the update is done and flushed to disk, the journal is cleared. If there is system crash, then the journal applied during the next boot up. Most filesystems today implement meta-data journals to ensure the filesystem integrity can survive a crash. The purpose of data-journaling is to ensure the files themselves maintain as much integrity as possible. So when a crash occurs, during the reboot both the normal metadata journal and data journal are applied prior to declaring the filesystem clean. Ext3 is the only FS (that I am aware of) that offers a data-journaling option. FYI: I have never used it because I just assume it will slow things down. Using a fast SSD to hold the data journal would probably overcome that problem. Some of those are simply amazingly fast and can do random i/o equally fast. (Others are extremely slow to "seek" which I don't understand since there is nothing to seek.) And most journals just need to be a GB or two so the expense is not necessarily too great to consider. Greg -- Greg Freemyer Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer First 99 Days Litigation White Paper - http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/99%20Days%20whitepaper.pdf The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org