Filesystem for a netbook with a SSD
 

Ok so I recently purchases one of these new netbooks which came with a 8GB SSD and was wondering what kind of filesystem would be appropriate?
Is ext3 fine?
or should ext2 be used? as it does not have journalling and thus less writing to the disks, apparently SSDs are more reliable in general?

Any opinions?
I wanted to ask this after reading the following:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9190

Thanks again, Ducky

In general you don't want to use a journalized filesystem on flash, repetitive writes should be avoided whenever possible. You also want to disable functions like atime, which will prevent unnecessary writes.

There is a massive debate (fueled in part by the netbook explosion) about how susceptible modern flash devices are to repetitive write cycles. On one hand modern flash chips have much better wear leveling hardware than previous generations, and on the other hand, it really doesn't hurt to be overcautious in this case.

I found having a non-journaled file system is very inconvenient, I tried ext2 for a while, I really missed journals. The good thing is, you can add journals to ext2 and turn it into ext3 without formatting.

Run ext2 for a while, if you can tolerate it, keep it. If you can't, use tunefs and convert it to ext3.

The prices of SSD's are dropping every day, by the time you will wear it out, you will be able to replace it with a cheaper, faster, larger one. There are many people saying the SSD's we have now are going to outlive the usefulness of the netbooks themselves.

You aren't going to wear it out in under a year by just using a journaled file system.

One of the main pushes (for me) towards a non journaled filesystem is the possible speed increases, the longer life is more of a bonus.

The laptop will be for personal use and I plan to hopefully get an external HDD that would be journaled for backup, but this will be at a later date.

I read an article recently about a guy predicting the life of an average SSD and it was much longer than what the laptop itself would live to be.

Anyone notice any considerable speed differences?
what where your annoyances regarding ext2 instead of ext3?
and I have heard it is possible to format it ext3 and just mount it as ext2, although I am not sure if this is any better than just plain ext2-ing the partition.

Thanks again, Ducky

I just got tired of the data loss during a crash and long fsck processes at boot, which isn't a common problem for me anymore since I've finalized my install. From what I've heard, ext2 and ext3 are virtually identical, except for the journaling. You can mount ext3 as ext2 and it will just ignore the journal, making it act no different from ext2. You can switch between them at any time, so you can compare for yourself.

I've used a couple different file systems on here and haven't noticed a massive difference between them. I have been thinking about switching to JFS, since it seemed to be the journaled file system that made the fewest writes.