Hey guys. I'm going to be installing some new Linux distros onto my computer, and I'm wondering: what's the best journaling filesystem among these: ext3, xfs, or reiserfs 3.6? I've heard that XFS is very fast, but it's also very prone to corruption if the power goes out unexpectedly. I've also heard that ReiserFS is very fast, but it suffers from the same problem that XFS does, and that ext3 is the best all around filesystem. Does it matter which one I use? Thanks guys

In my limited experience, I like ext3 for the / filesystem (especially /boot as some distros couldn't boot from xfs - that may have changed). However, if you have a filesystem that will have large files on it, xfs or jfs seems better. ext3 was very slow to delete large files (>2GB) on my mythtv storage partition. But xfs deletes them right away. I've never messed with Reiserfs. I'm excited to see if ext4 works better for large files just because I've always been happy with it as an all around file system.

So what your saying, pljvaldez, is that it may be best to use ext3 or ext2 for my boot drive, and then use like xfs, jfs, reiserfs or otherwise for my /home disk?

That's my strategy, for whatever it's worth. If you're not planning on any large files, ext3 is fine for everything. But it took like 35 seconds to delete a 2GB file, which happens a lot when you run Mythtv and delete old recordings.

I'd be doing things with a lot of large files on my /home disk...I rip the DVD's I buy to back them up so I can watch them without wearing out my DVD's or my drive. Those usually weigh in at about 700MB-1000MB depending on length, quality, size and codec used, but I also rip the VOB's to my /home partition too, and those weigh in at about 4.3GB-8GB...

Yes, it does, but there is no right answer. Different FSs do best in different circumstances (predominantly large files, predominantly small files, a mix of the two...) and there isn't a 'best at everything' filesystem.

Well, there is a trade off there. See this for details on ext3 optimisation, but the principle is generally applicable: In the safest and slowest mode, it is likely to be a bit safe and slow, in the fastest and most 'on the bleeding edge mode' its likely to be fast and on the bleeding edge. And that means, if someone tells you 'system x is fast, but on the bleeding edge' and they don't tell you the setup details, or 'system y is slow, but safe', they haven't really told you anything. It is also worth noting that, in general, the more 'advanced' a filesystem is, the more potential there is for fiddling with the characteristics to improve behaviour (eg, write barriers).

to be a teensy bit pedantic

• you don't set up the filesystem characteristics, disk-by-disk, but partition-by-partition,
• you can, therefore, have different characteristics (totally different filesystems, or just the same filesystems with different options) on each partition, so whether you can 'tune' this specifically for /home depends totally on whether /home is a separate partition, or not
• for some applications - a mailserver would be a typical example, but there are others - it makes sense to say 'this box has this work profile, we'll take that into account in the partitioning/tuning'; for most general desktop usage, that doesn't really apply, and you might as well go for a 'one size fits all' kind of solution
• if you mean that you have a /boot partition, I've never seen the use of having that be journalled, so would set that up as ext2
• if /boot is just part of a larger / partition, then it has to have what / has

Currently, I am tending to use ext2 for /boot (if a separate partition) and ext3 for everything else. I previously tended to use reiser, and I have the clear impression that reiser was faster, in general use (and on slow hardware, which is why every last bit of speed was important), but it was more likely to lose data on crashes...but maybe this was just an artefact of being tuned for speed and not for safety (and the fact that reiser is good on lots of small files).

For applications in which you are predominantly dealing with a few large files, there may be better choices then the ext series (and there are almost certainly better choices than reiser).

Ext4 is, I'm sure, good, but will BTRFS be better? I'm not clear about that, but there is a clear upgrade path from ext3 to btrfs and not (currently?) from ext4. So, I am not clear whether going to ext4 makes any sense for me, or whether I should stick to ext3 until I am convinced that btrfs is really ready.

Well guys, I gave XFS a try...and well...it was a huge pile of suck. It was too slow, too resource intensive, and I don't see what all the hype is about, so XFS is OFFICIALLY CUT from this discussion. I'm using ReiserFS for now...

FS's are just like football teams, everyone thinks the one s/he uses is the best. Ext3 is usually considered the standard Linux FS for many reasons. It's also considered to be stable and perform adequately under any kind of work load.

Can't comment on speed. Really, I never ever felt the need to research about that aspect of FS's. I can confirm it's not the best FS if you cannot guarantee a constant power supply. XFS is often regarded as the FS to choose if you deal with big files. What most people don't know is that when XFS says "big" it means to say files in the range of many hundred GBs or even TBs, and not just a few DVD movie files. Any FS can easily handle that without any problem.

However, with the coming of modern FS's like Ext4 and Btrfs this strong point of XFS becomes less and less relevant.

I wouldn't recommend using reiser 3.x nowadays, it seems not to be the most maintained FS around and anyway it always suffered important issues when it comes to file fragmentation and cpu usage (for me, anyway). But, to tell the truth, it's been long since the last time I tried it.

ext3,standard filesystem for linux.

The fast systems (and the BBC reckon XFS is the fastest there is) are generally designed with servers in mind, where data is protected by the raid system. For a desktop or laptop, ext3 gives that extra security for a single drive. That's why the distros generally make it the default.