* Barry Gill; on 22 Jan, 2004 wrote:
Being a long time user of both, I have found that ReiserFS is easier to recover from failure, but EXT3 is less prone to failure.
Looking in the SuSE 8.2 Professional Manual, there are some very concise and clear definitions of what the pro's and con's of the various different filesystems are.
It is interesting to discover how one can read things and not pay attention to discover later it has been there for ages
I would suggest reading through something like this to give you a better understanding of what the differences are.
(Especially when it comes to maximum allowable partitions/filesizes etc)
According to the 8.2 Admin guide page 490(pdf version) "Ext3 is designed to take care of both metadata and data.The degree of care can be customized.Enabling Ext3 in the data=journal mode offers maximum security (i.e., data integrity), but can slow down the system as both metadata and data are journaled.A relatively new approach is to use the data=ordered mode, which ensures both data and metadata integrity, but uses journaling only for metadata.The file system driver collects all data blocks that correspond to one metadata update.These blocks are grouped as a transaction and will be written to disk before the metadata is updated.As a result, consistency is achieved for metadata and data without sacrificing" "ReiserFS has proven to be a powerful alternative to the old Ext2.Its key assets are better disk space utilization, better disk access performance, and faster crash recovery.However, there is a minor drawback:ReiserFS pays great care to metadata but not to the data itself.Future generations of ReiserFS will include data journaling (both metadata and actual data are written to the journal) as well as ordered writes." So my understanding from the above is the lack of caring for the data itself causes reiserfs to be drawn awya from the filesystem choice. Since Ext3 can take care of metadata and data itself becomes a winner. -- Togan Muftuoglu | Unofficial SuSE FAQ Maintainer | Please reply to the list; http://susefaq.sf.net | Please don't put me in TO/CC. Nisi defectum, haud refiecendum