The best file system for home server

LuzbeL · n00b Joined: 30 Apr 2010 Posts: 68

Hello, I am assembling a home server at home, and I want to know what file system is the best, most stable and most give up ... The server is an old PC Socket 462, AMD Athlon XP 3000 +, 2gb ram ...

Thanks!

ultraincognito · Guru Joined: 03 Jun 2011 Posts: 346 Location: Ukraine

Use ext4 and be happy.

Arkhelion · Apprentice Joined: 07 Sep 2010 Posts: 151 Location: France

I don't claim - at all - to be a specialist in FS, so that's a very personal opinion below...

It's really hard to tell. It greatly depends on what you aim to do with your "home server" (file hosting? media sharing? what kind of files/media?). I fyou really want to optimize it, you might want to use a different FS for - let's say - your mailqueue/mailbox FS and your family-video-sharing. Some FS are better handling large files, some are better browsing large sets of tiny files.

Ext4 is new but quite stable and may be a good choice it's quite "average" in most categories. The downside of Ext* is mainly the regular FSCK you may have at boot time. ReiserFS is quite on hold as I think there aren't a lot of maintainers since the conviction of Hans Reiser in 2008, but the actual version is pretty stable, so it's not a big deal.

If you feel like you don't want to hear about your server, then I would probably go for ext4 everywhere, if you wanna tweak it a bit, I'd probably put an XFS for mailqueue/mailbox, saw some benchmarks once saying it was a bit faster handling lots of files.

If you're feeling adventurous, I'd try BtrFS as it may be more flexible in adding/expanding filesystems without the use of external tools like LVM (which needs an initrd to be used as a / FS).
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Arkhelion

Deathwing00 · Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2011 9:54 am Post subject:

If it's a home server, ext4 will give you better performance than ext3 and will keep reliability.

krinn · Watchman Joined: 02 May 2003 Posts: 7470

i use ext3 & ext4 on mine:
ext3 for the gentoo partition, ext4 for everyone else. Ext3 because rock stable and i don't really care saving space with some strange fs, nor i care having a performant fs (or i would have put hw raid disks on it too). I only care for a secure fs that keep the datas and is really strong at not altering them or loosing them (or at least at recover them).
so ext3 is my choice, none can beat its stability & strongness vs datas lost.
i bypass its weakness by removing all others partitions from checking at boot and convert them to ext4 for faster fsck check. I was using ext3 on all of them, but tera drives are a real pain to check.
I'm really happy of the setup now, i can umount & check the ext4 fast when i want, and my ext3 might take a bit of time but only when booting.

Hans-Linux · Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2011 5:54 am Post subject:

I use since 15 years ReiserFS on home and office servers and desktops. I find it rock stable and very forgiving if someone pulls the plug during a write process. As of now it has always fully recovered on rebooting. I started using Linux with RAID 5 arrays ad ReiserFS to replace replace Novell and M$ NT and 2000 Servers.

VirtualBox has or used to have a problem when installed on EXT4 partitions.

Hans

cach0rr0 · Posted: Thu Jul 28, 2011 11:10 am Post subject:

not a perfect summation, but:

reliability? ext4
small file performance? reiserfs
predominately large files? XFS

now, the second i post that, someone who's a fan of one or the other is going to come in and cite some example of ext4 being unreliable, of reiserfs taking ever to mount and performance suffering under $foo condition, XFS misbehaving after a power outage (personally, this has never been an issue for me, it's been rock-solid in my experience) - it's not a perfect guideline, but a decent general pointer.

Under normal operation you won't notice much of a difference between the three. But, if you're transferring a large video file, you'll notice a difference with XFS. If you're untarring an archive with heaps of source files, youll notice a difference with reiserfs. Pick the activity you think you'll be doing most on this system, make your fs decision accordingly ("home server" means different things for different people - could mean a media server to some, a web server hosted at home for others)

I use XFS (mount with logbufs=8 else it's pointless)for /video and /home, as most of the files I deal with there are either relatively large, or not so innumerable and thrash-inducing.
For a while I used reiserfs for things like /var, but the mount time eventually made me switch
and I still use ext4 (or even ext3) on most systems for /
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d2_racing · Posted: Thu Jul 28, 2011 11:13 am Post subject:

I use EXT4 for now and maybe one day I'm gonna use Btrfs if they ever get stable.

disi · Posted: Thu Jul 28, 2011 3:11 pm Post subject:

solamour · Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2011 7:10 am Post subject:

I've been using ReiserFS for quite a while but recently switched to ext4. Nothing particularly wrong with ReiserFS; I just wanted to try something different. I might add ext4's being the default file system in Ubuntu might have influenced the decision.

Frankly I can't really tell the difference. Then again, I'm not particularly pick about it, and I didn't perform a thorough benchmark or anything even remotely close. I think any wide-used file systems are a good choice, as long as you stay away from things like VFAT or NTFS (I'm sure running Linux on those file system is doable).
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sol