Hi,

We currently have all our volumes partitioned with ext3 and I'm wondering if there's a better option. We have volumes from 500GB to 2TB and recently had a power event. The 2TB volumes took over an hour to fsck.

Is there a better way? I'm not sure there is. These volumes are all basically re-used as file shares. Lot's of reads, writes, large files, small files... Normal operations are fine, we don't really need to optimize for databases or anything.

Suggestions? XFS?

We're basically all RedHat/CentOS with every release known to man... But I will be migrating to RHEL (5).

TIA

Hi.

The filesystems shouldn't have needed an fsck if they're ext3 - the journal should have been recovered and the boot should have continued normally.

Dave

Not that it will be easy to migrate, but my suggestion is to definitely look at XFS. But, you don't really seem to have a specific "type" of file, not "mostly large" or "mostly small" so maybe ext3 would be fine; as has been noted, it shouldn't have been necessary (you may just have it setup that way, check /etc/fstab) since the journal should have recovered unless something really bad happened.

XFS is nice when working with large files, it deletes fast, has always (knock on something wood-ish) been very stable for me and easy to recover. The only time I had a "gotcha" was when I setup an LVM arrangement and XFS didn't work well with resizing the volume (shrinking if I remember right). So as long as you don't anticipate shrinking your disks, XFS is really nice.

-Chad