which will mainly be for storage/samba share - im going to put all my music and stuff on there so sort of a nas really, reiserfs is out from the start, i have used ext2 since i started using slackware 8 and have stuck with it just because it works, but i find that 5% of 1TB is going to be a bit of a waste of space, many have said against ext3 as there can be issues with the journal being corrupted, although everything i will be putting on there is always on dvd/cd.

I have used XFS is the past but abandoned that when a few little bugs appeared in the program which could cause corruption issues, although from reading lately its not too bad. The system needs to be fast as i will be playing ripped dvds (that i own) and other files from the slack pc to the windows pc through a gbit connection so it needs to be able to do quite a few mb a sec to keep up.

Depending on how long ago you tried XFS it might be the best option currently for Linux. If you were using Solaris or FreeBSD 7.0 I would say ZFS but it's very sketchy on linux.

think i used XFS back in 2.6.21 days - yes i have used ZFS on FreeBSD but thats only for 64bit systems (unstable on 32bit) plus it requires a lot of mem, i still have a bit of time before i have to sort the lvm out so i suppose i could wait for a few more replies

How about JFS? I use JFS on my desktop and mythtv box with no problems. Could that be an option (if not XFS)?

I've been wanting to build a storage server along the same line that you described. If anyone is building/running such a server, please post hardware specs.

Thanks,

i have never used JFS - XFS yes - i suppose i could give the 2 a re-look over, i have already install slackware with all the XFS tools in it - think i removed JFS.

Specs in case you were wondering

AMD64 X2 4200
3GB Corsair ram
2 x 500GB Seagate sataII (300)
1 x 200GB Seagate sata(150)

Edit: after doing a lot of googling it looks like i might go with XFS as its more mature in Linux, what do people use on their other partitions, atm im using ext2 for boot and home, it worth using xfs on /home as that's 60GB (contains web site and various other things) and just keep ext2 for boot ?

JFS and XFS are the best when using large file and partition sizes. I personally think JFS is better, it is safer (less chance of corruption), uses less CPU time, and is faster in many cases than any other journaled filesystem available for Linux in about 80 - 90 % of cases. It's a good choice I think.

ok so i will use JFS for lvm - it a good idea to use it for home partition too? leaving boot as ext2 ?

so set up would be

10gb / - ext2
4gb /swap
60gb /home - jfs
1tb /medis - jfs

You can use it for everything if you choose to. I know most distros use ext2 for the '/boot' partition (assuming there is one). The reasons behind this aren't too clear to me tho.

how safe is it on boot though - as i say i have been a ext2 user for many years and this is unknown ground to me, i do know if i use it on boot i will have to make sure its in the kernel when i recompile it, prob with put it as built in as i tend to forget things, if jfs is all that and a bag of chips i might move the laptop from ext2 to jfs

Ext3 is very solid. I have never had data loss or corruption and I use nothing else on servers and desktops.

About the 5% unused space for ext2/ext3 ... this is a no-brainer.
The percentage of disk space reserved for the administrator is indeed set to 5% on a ext2/3 filesystem but you can change that percentage on the fly using tune2fs.
Using you will free all those 5% of diskspace for your use at once, and you can do that right now. No need for rebooting, remounting or whatever else.

Eric

i have seen one drive that was knackered after a power cut - no matter how many fscks you did it kept kicking up about corrupted journal and blocks, so are you saying ext3 for all drives? And i was just about to install the system, think I'll wait a bit longer

Mind you i suppose i could use ext3 - if someone like you is using it i would be a fool not to follow such advise

is it safe to get rid of all the reserved space or should i keep at least 1% ?

On partitions where I keep 'just' data I always set the reserved percentage to zero, because there is not much sense in having reserved blocks there.
The story is different for partitions where the system needs to write (think of logfiles, updates, locks, tempfiles). If such a partition fills up 100% by accident, you as root will still be able to write there (using the 5% space reserved for you) so you can take emergency measures.

Eric

doesn't ext3 do constent read and writes to the drive though - if so wouldn't that shorten the life of the drive(s)

You don't need support for the /boot-fs in the kernel. It might be a filesystem totally unknown to linux and never get mounted - it just doesn't matter. (For example, you could boot your kernel from a floppy without any filesystem.)

This might happen to every filesystem on earth after a power failure. If you want to be as secure as possible then use BSD with traditional FFS or NetBSDs implementation of ext2 (which is much more stable than the one in linux but much slower too).

It won't do any damage but what for? You really don't want to fill up any filesystem to more than say about 90%. At this level fragmentation leeds to serious loss in performance.