Best File System For Laptop?

zenlunatic · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2003 Posts: 312

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.

Jimbow · Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2003 6:29 am Post subject:

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.
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bLanark · Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2003 10:24 am Post subject:

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).

zenlunatic · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2003 Posts: 312

I wonder why when I had ext3 on this laptop the disk wrote uniformly like every 8 seconds. That was very annoying.

Jimbow · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2003 3:39 am Post subject: Re: Noises

kha · n00b Joined: 19 Mar 2003 Posts: 41

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
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erik_swanson · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2003 5:48 am Post subject:

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.

Githyanki · n00b Joined: 15 Apr 2003 Posts: 2

You may also want to try out sys-apps/noflushd to cut down on hard disk access.