Reiser, the fastest one installed by defautl supports b-tree that helps a lot when you actually have thusands of directories and thousends of files in each directory files with an excelent journal system.

Not much choice on Fedora Core, using ext3 hopefully they'll support reiserfs soon.

Nope. Redhat don't like it. Bitch to them. ;)

With a journaled file system, you don't need to scan the drive if it gets shut off without unmounting (i.e., power outage). This helps against corruption.

You can convert ext2 to ext3 by booting off a CD, leaving your drive unmounted, and typing tune2fs -j /dev/hda1 (or whatever it is).

Is there anyway to convert ext3 to reiserfs? Or would I have to reinstall Slackware in order to use reiserfs?

It's good to see Paul Reiser has found a new career, after Mad About You went off the air, ;)

I don't think there is, no. :(

I am currently using ext3 but after reading all of the comments you guys have posted about reiserfs I feel tempted to try it out. :)

hda1=ext 3
hda2=reiserfs 3.6

I get about 32MB/s on hda1

what's the trade-off?
how much more space does a journaled file system need?

...about 32mb for the journal

that's not much

and seeing as i think i might have hit some corruption after a power loss today i'd kinda like to try it out, but i don't want to have to start from scratch unless i absolutely have to (critical system failure)



anyone think it's possible to:
backup / to /home
change / from ext2 to reiserfs
restore / from /home
backup /home to /
change /home from ext2 to reiserfs
restore /home from /

any known problems, suggestions, recommendations?
or is ext3 my only option?

If you're feeling brave, go for it. I did a similar thing, but when I restored / my boot loader was corrupted and I had to reinstall :(. I think you'd be fine with changing /home, and if you have a /boot partition you could do / too...

The new statistics for Reiser 4 say:

Copying - Reiser 4
Overwriting - Reiser 4
Deleting - ReiserFS (Ext3 is faster than Reiser 4 at deleting)

I am using Ext3 only because it was painless to convert from Ext2 ( I didn't have to format my HDD )

you had to reinstall slack or you had to reinstall lilo?

brave? hmm... i'm willing to take a certain amount of risk, but not willing to risk having to reformat. i reformatted and reinstalled slack countless times in the first couple weeks after switching to linux. if it is necessary i won't have a problem doing it again, but not by choice. it would probably take me weeks to get the system back to where it is now.

so...booting from cd or floppy and executing "tune2fs -j /dev/hda1" and "tune2fs -j /dev/hda2" is basically risk free. the only possibility that would worry me (with either ext3 or reiserfs) would be a power failure during the conversion process. the power has been off and on here for days so whichever fs i decide on going with i'm going to wait until power has been stable for like a week straight.

when you backed up each partition to another partition before a format, what method did you use? did you tar the partition, create an image, etc? and for the format would it just be "mkfs -c -v -t reiserfs hda1" and "mkfs -c -v -t reiserfs hda2"?

i decided to go the "safe" route

followed the instructions earlier in this thread for converting
ext2 to ext3. the process was incredibly fast, i was expecting
it to take about the same amount of time as a low-level format.

i haven't been timing anything, but my boot seems to be
completing faster than it used to under ext2 (even when the
disk did not have to checked for errors)

i use reiserfs, i used to use ext2.... but then i decided to reinstall slack and give reiserfs a try. pretty happy with it.