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Naib
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 10:26 pm    Post subject: New home server build - what FS Reply with quote

Well my little ITX system is showing its age, esp being PATA and a small 80gig HD (thought that was big at the time ;)
I am looking at buying a new set of hardware with ability to hold 2HDD

I want to RAID the two drives together, but what FS? I would like to eventually use BTRFS, but that isn't possibly for a good few months.
What would be the best way to setup the system (in a month or two) to then easily goto BTRFS?
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i92guboj
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 10:53 pm    Post subject: Re: New home server build - what FS Reply with quote

Naib wrote:
Well my little ITX system is showing its age, esp being PATA and a small 80gig HD (thought that was big at the time ;)
I am looking at buying a new set of hardware with ability to hold 2HDD

I want to RAID the two drives together, but what FS? I would like to eventually use BTRFS, but that isn't possibly for a good few months.
What would be the best way to setup the system (in a month or two) to then easily goto BTRFS?


Probably -yet again :p- ext3/4.

http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Conversion_from_Ext3
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Naib
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PostPosted: Thu Jan 08, 2009 11:09 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

yer thought that.
So should forget about RAID for now (probably not even use 2nd HD) and when BTRFS stabilses then ext3->btrfs and add 2nd drive to the pool.

Or setup a mirrored RAID with ext3, and when BTRFS stabilises convert one of the two drives to btrfs and then get btrfs to add the 2nd drive the pool?
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ChojinDSL
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 13, 2009 10:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

If this is going to be a home server, e.g. dump all your data on it so you can access it via the network, then you can save yourself a lot of headache in the longrun if you stick to tried and true filesystems, such es ext3 for example.

Just because you can successfully format a partition with new filesystem and copy files onto it, is no guarantee that you wont experience trouble down the road.

And you know how it usually hits you, whenever you least expect it and when your in a tight spot where you need your data NOW.


As long as your FS/HD can saturate your network link, all is good. Unless of course your home server is going to be accessed by a lot of people simultaenously and you intend on running resource heavy databases and mail servers on it.
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nerdbert
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 14, 2009 10:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Naib wrote:
Or setup a mirrored RAID with ext3, and when BTRFS stabilises convert one of the two drives to btrfs and then get btrfs to add the 2nd drive the pool?


Alternatively use one disk right now, if the files on it aren't that important. Buy another 2 later on and create an incomplete RAID5 (consisting of the the new disks). Copy your data over to the RAID5, delete the original disk and add it.

That way you are "just" wasting 33% for redundancy, not 50% :D
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chris...
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 25, 2009 1:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ChojinDSL wrote:
As long as your FS/HD can saturate your network link, all is good.


same, I have no need for some FS that is 10% faster then some other FS on a certain type of file size or whatever. All FS out perform what I require so any will do for me. What I picked wasnt a result of some numbers in a spread sheet, I picked a FS based on features such as commonality, tools, support and stability

what are you actually using this server for? being a home server unless you have multiple family members and very high speed network any file system will be fine
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Naib
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 25, 2009 1:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

:D been built for a couple of weeks
Home NAS and simple http for stuff

went for Ext4
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depontius
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 25, 2009 2:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

chris... wrote:
ChojinDSL wrote:
As long as your FS/HD can saturate your network link, all is good.


same, I have no need for some FS that is 10% faster then some other FS on a certain type of file size or whatever. All FS out perform what I require so any will do for me. What I picked wasnt a result of some numbers in a spread sheet, I picked a FS based on features such as commonality, tools, support and stability

what are you actually using this server for? being a home server unless you have multiple family members and very high speed network any file system will be fine


With those criteria there's only one answer - ext3. That's what I run on my home servers. I'm trying to get all of my hardware to kernels which run ext4, but plan to wait a bit before moving over. At the moment I'm more interested in getting my MythTV backend media store from xfs to ext4.
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Spaulding
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 4:21 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

imo you should choose xfs :twisted:
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neuron
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 4:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

keep in mind that ext3 can be bad when it comes to fragmentation, I had a server being written to by 5-6 users at the same time, and fragmentation on each file rose very quickly. Not so with ext4. There are however known data loss issues in ext4 (I dont care on that server, as the data is only temporary, and can easily be recovered, I have ext3 on root).
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i92guboj
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 5:12 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

neuron wrote:
keep in mind that ext3 can be bad when it comes to fragmentation,


I've never experienced any problem related to that. It's true that it fragments, just like any other fs. But the impact in performance has never been noticeable by me, assuming that you have enough free space, of course.

But even if it was noticeable, it certainly can't be worse than reiserfs :p
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neuron
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PostPosted: Sun Mar 01, 2009 6:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

i92guboj wrote:
neuron wrote:
keep in mind that ext3 can be bad when it comes to fragmentation,


I've never experienced any problem related to that. It's true that it fragments, just like any other fs. But the impact in performance has never been noticeable by me, assuming that you have enough free space, of course.

But even if it was noticeable, it certainly can't be worse than reiserfs :p


I had multiple blocks being written at once by multiple sources and ended up with an iowait of about 45%, switched to ext4 and it's down to 3-5% under similar loads, so yeah, in my situation it mattered loads ;)
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