I think what I have yet to see an answer to is, aside from faster fs checking, what advantages does reiserfs confer. Or more precisely, a)What advantage does it give on a user workstation ? b)What advantage does it give on a server ?
Against ext2 the answer is
1) No corrupted file system. In case of crash you lose the data in the buffers that haven't been flushed yet, but the file system will never be corrupted.
2) It is significantly faster on small files, because of its revolutionary B-Tree inspired method of storing data. It is, to my knowledge, slightly slower at large files, but I don't think the difference is large enough to be called significant.
3) It is incredibly more efficient at storing small files. In ext2, a file always uses an integral number of blocks. Reiser stores files differently. ext2 with 4k block size: 2 files of 1k consumes 8k, in reiser they consume 2k. Yes, there is some overhead on metadata and journals, but believe me, I notice the difference on a server with many files. Ths more files, the bigger the difference.
There was a problem in 2.4.0 with reiser, but since then AFAIK it's safe to use on servers.
I have a little problem with reiser fs though. It seems it corrupts the "wtmp" file, at least in my systems. I got this problem only in my reiser fs machine, and I have noticed that someone else has got the same experience... I dont remember who and where. Praise