JFS or ext3, suggestions?

[musv]

I was using Reiserfs (3.6), JFS, XFS and Reiser4 for several years. I've read a lot about to find the "perfect" combination for me. In this time I've had 3 computers and of all I had a lot of hard-resets. Here are my limited experiences:

Reiserfs (3.6):
I used it for several years for root, home and other stuff.
Advantages: On a new installation it's very fast. It's reliable. I never had any data corruptions or other problems. I used it without problems for media data on root and for the home directories.
Big disadvantage: If you change data quite often (e.g. daily update of Portage tree) or have a full disc, it's getting incredibly slow after a while (maybe half a year). There's no defrag-tool.

Reiser4:
It's very reliable. I had never data corruptions oder data loss. It's my actual root partition filesystem. I'm using it for more than 3 years on my root-drives.
Advantages: Incredibly fast. Less disc access. Something like a bigger fragmentation I didn't recognize. Until now no problems when the computer crashes. Seldom after a hard reset I wasn't able to mount the Reiser4 partition. But after a fsck.reiser4 everything worked again. Also the transparent compression is a nice feature.
Disadvantages:
1. You have to patch the kernel. For 2.6.29 there's still no official patch available.
2. If you want to check the filesystem, you have to use fsck.reiser4 from the reiser4progs. Checking a partition needs a lot of time depending on the number of files on that partition (up to 1 hour for my 30GB root partition).
3. It's not suitable for a home partition. I tried it for a while. VMWare with WindowsXP as a vmx-image on Reiser4 occures a lot of disc usage. Running VMWare made the whole computer unusable. Same problem with p2p-software. Running Azureus or aMule occures a incredible disc usage too. And also the kde3-apps seem to synchronize every step on disc. For example: When I opened a new tab in Quanta I could hear there was a disc access. And that slows down the usage. I found a solution by moving the ~/.kde directory into a tmpfs when the system starts

XFS:
Very fast, light weight. I'm using it for my multimedia stuff (MP3 and movies). After the first data loss (see disadvantages) I haven't had any problems. I'm using it for maybe 1-2 years now.
Big advantage: It comes with a defrag-tool. And for my subjective impression it has the lowest latency of all when you try to access data.
Disadvantage: When I tried xfs for the first time I created a xfs partition, put a lot of movies on it, rebooted the machine and wasn't able to mount the xfs partition. xfs_repair and xfs_dump didn't help. 20 Gb of data loss. It was the only time I lossed data with a file system. In a debian forum they wrote, that xfs comes with some mechanims to check the filesystem integrity but not the data integrity.

JFS:
Due to the Reiser4 problems JFS is my actual file system for home. VMWare and P2P is working usable, the kde-stuff too.
Advantage: It's reliable. Also after a lot of hard resets I never had a data loss.
Disadvantages: After a hard reset or a not clear unmount it's always replaying the journal which needs up to a minute. But the biggest annoying thing is: It seems to fragment totally. My home partition is filled up to 90% - sometimes up to 99%. Especially files downloaded by p2p occure a disc usage where you could think the computer is moving tons of GB on the disc. Solution here: cp that files from the JFS parition to another disc and back. Then it's working.

Summary:
If you make a big usage of backups and UPS, then xfs would be my first choice particularly with regard to the defrag-tool. Also Reiser4 for my experience is very recommendable. Because of the slowdown I'm not very happy with JFS. In many aspects it seems not to be the fastest one. But nevertheless it's reliable. A defrag-tool exists on IBM operating systems but not for Linux. Reiserfs I'm not using any more. I replaced it with Reiser4. Maybe I'll consider to replace JFS with Reiserfs. And about btrfs it's not worth to speak, it's still alpha stadium.

Ext2 I'm using for my boot-partition. Ext3 I haven't never used on my private computers. For some reason I can't explain I don't like the ext-stuff. Maybe I would use ext3 on a production-server where reliability is far more important than speed. About ext4 I read of some problems, but never got in touch with it.

[rrbrussell]

Of the file systems that I have used and use regularly I recomend Ext3 for right now usage and then upgrade to Ext4 in 3 to 6 months. If you are sure that the 2.6.28 kernel will not give you fits, I would go ahead and move to Ext4.

I have not had any rememberable data loss on XFS, JFS, or Reiser 3. I do however rember the rapid performance degredation from really nice new to slow after only a few months. I never bothered with trying to defragment any of these file systems. I just moved back to Ext3 which never really seemed to have the sharp performance degradation relative to age. If I remember correctly another reason I have consistently used Ext3 and now Ext4 is their more reliable resizing option.

Ext4 appears to be the fastest file system I have used. It also appears to keep that edge even when dealing with full data journaling, logical volumes fragmented across 2 disks with several resizes and the default allocation policy, full disk AES-256 encryption on both disks, and file fragmentation of around 20% if fsck's output is to be believed.

[leviathan4444]

I just wanted to wrap up my post here and say thanks to everyone who posted. I really appreciate your suggestions and thoughts. I also wanted to let everyone know what my decision is.
I have decided to go with JFS. If JFS turns out to be painfully slow, I will switch to XFS. I know that XFS is faster, and I like the defrag and freeze capabilities, but those scattered reports of occasion problems make me nervous.
Thanks again to everyone who posted!

[paulbiz]

I was going to recommend "anything but JFS" but as you've already made your decision I will simply wish you good luck

My suggestion for JFS: If you suffer a crash/power outage and the journal replay fails, DO NOT fsck the partition or else it'll rename potentially hundreds of thousands of files and directories to meaningless numbers. Use a JFS recovery tool to find the lost files and copy everything off to another disk. Then format the JFS partition and copy everything back, and try to figure out what's missing. Failing the presense of full and recent backups, I would at least generate some kind of list of all files in your JFS partition and store it on another disk so that if you suffer a failure, you can figure out what's missing.

I've tried XFS, ext3 and ext4 as well. I don't do anything too intensive and on modern hardware none of them really make any difference as far as I can tell. When using XFS and lost power to the drive (external drive power supply died), it could not be mounted, but I was able to use the xfs tools to recover the files to another disk.

From reliablity ext3 is the one I have the most luck with. I've never had any issue after crashes/power failure and it generally seems to "just work". Plus it is ext2-backwards-compatible so there are more tools for dealing with potential issues.

Now I'm using ext4 on my laptop, converted from ext3, and really don't notice any difference. On my desktop I'm using ext3 mounted as ext4 so I can get the supposed improvements(which I can't notice) while still maintaining backwards-compatibility in case anything goes wrong.

[shazeal]

[paulbiz]

[pixxt]

Use any file-system you want just stay away from Reiser 3. It is a dead filesystem no pun intended, its the slowest file-system upon boot-up it fragments easily and real world use suggests it suffers from bit rot, i.e. the longer you use it the slower it gets. It does not scale up in performance with added cpus or added disks.

[shazeal]