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zenlunatic Guru
Joined: 09 Apr 2003 Posts: 312
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Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2003 3:10 am Post subject: Best File System For Laptop? |
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I am planning to install Gentoo on my laptop. I was wondering what opinions people have regarding the use of journaled file systems on a laptop. My understanding, although not completely thorough, is that journal file systems uniformily write to the disk. Wouldn't this cause battery loss and increase the amount of annoying header noise? I don't want to be in the library with my reiserfs writing journals and making a bunch of noise you know! By the way, I am running a non-Intel architecture, which I have read can influence the stability of the file system, meaning that certain file systems are just not as thoroughly developed for certain architectures. Let me know what your running or your laptop or would recommend to me given my scenario. |
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Jimbow Guru
Joined: 18 Feb 2003 Posts: 597 Location: Silver City, NM
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Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2003 6:29 am Post subject: |
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My /boot partition is ext2, all my other Linux partitions are ReiserFS. The great thing about Rieser on my laptop (Dell i8.2K) is that when I am screwing around with APM and stuff like that I can get it to lock up. I wait for any disk activity to stop and the just hit the big red switch. When it reboots the file system says that it was not unmounted cleanly but there is no delay and no corruption. It just works. Don't leave home without it. Also, you will be accessing the physical disk less with Rieser not more. _________________ After Perl everything else is just assembly language. |
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bLanark Apprentice
Joined: 27 Aug 2002 Posts: 181 Location: Royal Berkshire, UK
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Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2003 10:24 am Post subject: |
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My laptop is exclusively ext3. I think that for a laptop a journaling file systems is a good idea, especially if, like me, yours has a faulty battery connection from time to time. I can't recall seeing fsck running on startup (not since the hard drive broke and I got a new one, anyway).
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uniformily write to the disk
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Don't know what you mean - that they write to the hard drive all the time? Not so. as I understand it, the difference is that they make a note in their journal of where they intend to write to, then write, then mark that item complete in the journal. If the hard drive goes down, then the file system knows where to look for inconsistencies, rather than checking the whole drive. This speeds things up a whole lot at fsck time. Now, ext2 must still make a note that it's planning to write to the disk, and also "undo" or "complete" the write information after, otherwise it wouldn't know to fsck the file system on restart, but I guess that ext3 writes more data than ext2. [What happens to the areas on the disk that are used for this? Do they wear out from frequent use?]
Can't comment on the efficiency of rieser, I only use it on my server 'cos I can resize partitions online when using LVM. I wasn't even aware that it was journaling!
HTH _________________ .sig: access denied |
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zenlunatic Guru
Joined: 09 Apr 2003 Posts: 312
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Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 3:32 am Post subject: Noises |
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I wonder why when I had ext3 on this laptop the disk wrote uniformly like every 8 seconds. That was very annoying. |
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Jimbow Guru
Joined: 18 Feb 2003 Posts: 597 Location: Silver City, NM
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Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 3:39 am Post subject: Re: Noises |
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zenlunatic wrote: | I wonder why when I had ext3 on this laptop the disk wrote uniformly like every 8 seconds. That was very annoying. |
Maybe its not related to the file system. I've got a tablet pc that runs Linux (with ext2). It has that same annoyance. I don't know what caused it. _________________ After Perl everything else is just assembly language. |
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kha n00b
Joined: 19 Mar 2003 Posts: 41
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Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2003 6:10 pm Post subject: |
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No matter what kind of file system you will use make sure that you actually use the noatime option in your fstab. This should keep th efile system from constantly access disk. Another good thing to do is to use hdparm to put your harddrive to sleep "faster". On basic configuration some HD can take up to one hour before they stop spining use man hdparm and look for the -S section for info (it is quite tricky). I personaly use -S 252 (21 minutes) but I often switch to -S 120 (600 seconds=10 minutes) when AC is off.
By the way I think ReiserFS is the best file system you can get for a general use on a laptop, it is quite consistent, fast and easy to use. Of course there are exceptions.
Kha _________________ Digital is perfect, but humans keeps on being analogic.
Viagra Is A Great Reccursive Acronym (can't use it though :( ) |
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erik_swanson Retired Dev
Joined: 02 Feb 2003 Posts: 123 Location: Corvallis, OR USA
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Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2003 5:48 am Post subject: |
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I use EXT3 with data=journal because with that setup, it's very hard to lose data if the machine shuts down unexpectedly. The performance hit isn't as bad as you might think it'd be with full data journaling, and I believe it to be worth it.
kha: Thanks for the tip of using "noatime" on a laptop to cut down unnecessary disk writes. |
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Githyanki n00b
Joined: 15 Apr 2003 Posts: 2
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Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2003 6:45 pm Post subject: |
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You may also want to try out sys-apps/noflushd to cut down on hard disk access. |
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