The Filesystem choice thread - Part 2

Message

carcajou · Post by **carcajou** » Sun Jun 27, 2010 9:09 pm

I opened topic with similar question some time ago.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-59 ... ight-.html

Ext3 works for me, no complaints yet.

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 3:29 am

EXT3 is there to stay and it's rocksolid IMOO.

jormartr · Post by **jormartr** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 1:36 pm

If you need stability: ext3
If you don't fancy features: ext3
If you want the most standard posible: ext3

You put it easy

kernelOfTruth · Post by **kernelOfTruth** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 3:53 pm

efficient space usage, : zfs
data safety, : zfs
compression : zfs
deduplication: zfs
other fancy features: zfs

so (in theory) zfs should be the ideal candidate

you need zfs-fuse 0.6.9 for that and a computer with enough RAM and CPU power

Dj_Dexter · Post by **Dj_Dexter** » Mon Jun 28, 2010 11:13 pm

If you need stability: ext3
if you need the file system is almost infallible, and resistant to power outages, or if your nephew restart the PC to hitting: ext3

because grub2 use, so I can not use EXT4: D

cach0rr0 · Post by **cach0rr0** » Tue Jun 29, 2010 8:05 am

for large files and large volumes, it's difficult to beat XFS imho

for every person I've come across that swears it isn't resilient to things like hard lockups or power loss, i encounter 2 that have had no issue - myself included.

always mounted with logbufs=8, and always with an internal log size as big as possible

frostschutz · Post by **frostschutz** » Tue Jun 29, 2010 9:42 am

It does not really matter what you use; I use a different filesystem for my backup disk (ext3) than for my system disk (xfs). Not because a different filesystem would be better for archiving, but because this way, in case of a kernel bug that causes data corruption for a specific filesystems, it would not affect both system and backup disk at the same time. Such kernel bugs are rare but they did occur in the past.

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Tue Jun 29, 2010 11:56 am

Indeed, look now with the BRTFS file corruption bug with git-kernel 2.6.35.

GWilliam · Post by **GWilliam** » Wed Jun 30, 2010 4:12 am

#NULL

GWilliam · Post by **GWilliam** » Wed Jun 30, 2010 4:15 am

#NULL

user124 · Post by **user124** » Thu Jul 08, 2010 6:40 am

frostschutz wrote:I use a different filesystem for my backup disk (ext3) than for my system disk (xfs).....

i'm quite happy to see i'm not the only one thinking that way

back on topic: i've never had problems with ext3, reiserfs and xfs (though my working pal had with reiser.. complete data loss. but thats what backups are for), choose whichever you want. imho more important then choosing the "right" fs is *multiple* backups. i mysqlf use 2 hd's, one at home, one at work, so if theres a fire at either places i still have a backup.

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Thu Jul 08, 2010 11:33 am

Indeed, regular backups is the key.

lord_sesshomaru · Post by **lord_sesshomaru** » Fri Jul 09, 2010 7:30 pm

Ok, thank you all for your opinions.

In the end, I used XFS and it was a good choice. I have not noticed any space overhead. It is bit surprising that you all recommend ext2/ext3 over ext4. I would think that ext4 added exactly those features that come in handy when dealing with terabytes of data (extents, online defragmentation).

Anyway, maybe I mislead you at the beginning - I should state more clearly that the purpose of that disk is to store loads of data - mostly some junk that is waiting to processed and filtered. I would not like to lose the content but it would not be irretrievable loss. The focus here is on the maximal usage of available space (no matter how big the disc is, it is always small

).

devsk · Post by **devsk** » Sun Jul 11, 2010 2:55 am

lord_sesshomaru wrote:Hi,
I have a new 1,5 TB extrernal hard drive and I am not sure what fs to put on it. Any ideas?

The disk is mainly for archiving - putting a lot of files there (typically with sizes from hundreds megabytes to several gigabytes), and reading them from time to time. Intensive usage or many parallel access are not planned. I don't see usage for any fancy features in this setup so even basic filesystem could do the work. My concerns are about overhead - I don't want to spend my precious disk space on fs datastructures.

What is good fs for this use case? Does anybody know of some benchmarks how much space does different fs take?

Try lessfs or zfs-fuse if you have lot of duplicative data. They are both very good for archival because they do block level dedup. zfs-fuse is better because it can detect (and even correct if you have redundancy) bit-rot.

timeBandit · Post by **timeBandit** » Sun Jul 11, 2010 4:11 am

Merged from [post=6333578]Filesystem for data archiving[/post] onward here.

Muso · Post by **Muso** » Sun Jul 11, 2010 6:45 am

kukibl wrote:I opened topic with similar question some time ago.

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-59 ... ight-.html

Ext3 works for me, no complaints yet.

Same here. I've tried numerous other file systems and each had their own merits and weaknesses, but ext3 is just solid. I think of ext3 like a loyal girlfriend with a weight problem. She's not the fastest thing around, but she'll do everything you want without complaints and won't run off with all of your data when mistreated.

mattwood2000 · Post by **mattwood2000** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 2:33 pm

Hi, I'm partitioning a new drive on a dual-boot system so that I have Windows XP, Gentoo Linux (boot, swap, /) and a "storage" partition that will be shared between the two OS's. I've done this in the past with no problem, but the new drive is a 1TB and the storage partition is over 500 GB.

Any comments on the most efficient and most stable filesystem to share between Windows and Linux?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking FAT32 is out from an efficiency standpoint, NTFS-FUSE is probably not that stable for data integrity standpoint...any suggestions?

Thanks, Matt.

timeBandit · Post by **timeBandit** » Tue Jul 13, 2010 2:52 pm

Merged above post here.

forkbomb · Post by **forkbomb** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 12:19 pm

mattwood2000 wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking FAT32 is out from an efficiency standpoint, NTFS-FUSE is probably not that stable for data integrity standpoint...any suggestions?

NTFS should be fine. FATn is a horrible file system that should be avoided if at all possible. Well, it was "meh" in its day, but the only reason to use it today is as a "lowest common denominator" for flash drives if you're jumping from OS to OS.

(edited - I forgot the in-kernel NTFS write support is incomplete) ntfs-3g will work. I've never had problems with it corrupting data or destroying a file system. Obligatory YMMV, but ntfs-3g has had a reputation of stability for quite some time.

mattwood2000 · Post by **mattwood2000** » Wed Jul 14, 2010 9:08 pm

Thanks forkbomb - I decided to go with NTFS.

Thanks for the advice.

-M

coolsnowmen · Post by **coolsnowmen** » Sat Jul 31, 2010 2:32 am

With hard drives densities increasing, I'm beginning to have a larger fear of 'bit rot'. I noticed that zfs was recommended for this.
1) Are there any other file systems that do ecc/checksums to be able to verify file integrity?
2) How stable is zfs?
3) Zfs isn't in the kernel right? what is the best way to use it for everything but '/',
4) Do I have to worry about updating it?

Ormaaj · Post by **Ormaaj** » Mon Aug 02, 2010 9:24 am

Why are people still recommending ext3 over ext4? Ext4 ought to be the safe choice these days for the stability needs of the average user. Most of the criticisms of ext4 are equally applicable to ext3 aside from it being newer (which I find to be a particularly lame criticism.)

xibo · Post by **xibo** » Thu Aug 05, 2010 12:27 pm

Ormaaj wrote:Why are people still recommending ext3 over ext4? Ext4 ought to be the safe choice these days for the stability needs of the average user. Most of the criticisms of ext4 are equally applicable to ext3 aside from it being newer (which I find to be a particularly lame criticism.)

I once lost data on ext4dev, like 10GiB spread over multiple files. I have no clue what it was caused by, but appearently ext4(dev) and the proprietary nvidia driver which i was using back then are not working well together.
Ever since ext4 became "stable" ( to me it's stable as i m not using the funky kernel-preemtion that seems to cause deadlocks according to changelogs ) i didn't have any problems with it.

I have a 10 disk raid-6 which started being a 4 disk raid-5 and grew one by one over the last year. I extended the ext4fs 5 times, and two disks broke in the meantime, which caused me to shrink and later extend again to maintain reduncancy. In the meantime it's pretty slow, so i wonder whether it's a side effect of all the shrinking and growing.

d2_racing · Post by **d2_racing** » Thu Aug 05, 2010 12:46 pm

Ormaaj wrote:Why are people still recommending ext3 over ext4? Ext4 ought to be the safe choice these days for the stability needs of the average user. Most of the criticisms of ext4 are equally applicable to ext3 aside from it being newer (which I find to be a particularly lame criticism.)

I'm actually testing EXT4 on my box with gentoo-sources 2.6.35 and it's a little bit faster.

And the fsck is lightning fast if you compare to EXT3.

aCOSwt · Post by **aCOSwt** » Thu Aug 05, 2010 1:08 pm

Ormaaj wrote:Why are people still recommending ext3 over ext4? Ext4 ought to be the safe choice these days for the stability needs of the average user. Most of the criticisms of ext4 are equally applicable to ext3 aside from it being newer

One year ago... Linus himself was prefering...
...
ext2 !

One thing for sure is do mount ext4 with default options. Do not mount ext3 with default options !
Personally... I do not care that much...
Apart from a few ufs2 remaining under my FreeBSD systems, ext2 for my gentoo boot partition and misc tmps... I get everything under zfs !

The Filesystem choice thread - Part 2

The winner is ... XFS

Re: Filesystem for data archiving

Best storage filesystem type for large partition

Re: Best storage filesystem type for large partition