I'd like to know what advantages and disadvantages one has over the other. I do understand how they both work but i'd like some practical real-life criticism in terms of speed and reliability in medium to large disks (40gb or more ata133), as well as any possible compatiblity issues seen with specific brands or models...

Any comments greatlly appreciated...

Mux.

Well, there were discussions already here, and a quick search might help you to retrieve the appropriate threads.
Basically, reiserFS is much faster on a filesystem with small-size files, and utilization of space is much better. With ext3 you aren't likely to get corrupted files in a case of unattended reboot (when you pull a plug for instance) due to a different "flushing" technique. JFS is highly recommended for enterprises, and XFS is a new kid in town that supports large files (therabytes of space) . So read this article in Linux Magazine http://www.linux-mag.com/2000-08/journaling_01.html for more info.

Thanks, i had already read that article. Nice.
I just wanted some feedback on real practice rather than theory, given that i've tried only one of them.

Mux.

I will put in my plug for reiserfs... In theory it is way more efficient and I have never had any pronlems with it now that 2.4 kernels are pretty much standard issue. There was a little bit of pain in the past when we were dealing with early version 2.4 kernels that didn't support it well and 2.2 kernels that didn't support it at all out of the box.

Of course that is just my opinion... ext3 certainly has its advantages. Being able to mount it ext2 is really nice if you accidently forget to compile ext3 support into your kernel. The ability to convert form ext2 to ext3 without redoing the partition or loosing data is pretty nice as well.

I've been running reiserfs since 1999 and it's caused me no grief.

Been looking forward to ReiserFS 4 for quite some time now. It's due out dec31 2002. IMHO - it's gonna be the giant-killer. My favourite item will be the ACLs at the filesystem level.

I used ext3fs since red aht started defaulting to it, Maybe one year....
Now I am using SoL with desktop extensions on reiserfs. It has been up save for two power outages since early september. No problems.

I've been using ext3 for a while, and am not particularly happy with it. It
seems to cause some pretty bad performance hits (especially with tar),
and the only reason I haven't changed (to reiserfs) is because I don't
have an easy way of backing up close to 60 GB of data. . . In fact, just
recently, I went back to ext2 for a couple of days and noticed a nice
increase in responsiveness, but then had a visitor who booted my
machine w/o asking me (and when they didn't see windows appear,
turned it off w/o asking), so I went back to journaling since any is better
than none. I'll wait for reiserfs4 (and maybe Slackware 9.1) before I go
through the hell of switching, but I will do so.
Also, a lot of what the reiserfs team is planning is very exciting, and
very innovative, which is as good a reason as any for me to support
them.

You can check out this http://br.crashed.net/~akrowne/ext2_vs_reiser.html

Thanks everyone, good to know..

I guess Reiser will be the fs on my new drive.

Mux.

Just found this article... may have been posted in the other ext3 vs reiserfs thread but I haven't seen that one yet.

http://www.gurulabs.com/ext3-reiserfs.html