I am wondering about moving to reiserfs, at first I had no major reason, ext3 has served me well, but nevertheless I began investigating...

Basically, what it seemed to come down to is:

Ext3 is tried and true, solid and reliable, but usually slower than reiserfs, especially with lots of small files, and reiserfs is less robust. Reiserfs also has less overhead (in terms of space, ext3 seems quite wasteful).

But what I didn't find, were any reasons for why (or even explanations of how) reiserfs is less robust, so is it really?

I also found some people saying reiserfs is no good on laptops, somebody said it spins the disk all the time, somebody else that it messes up suspending.

One other thing which has been nagging at the back of my mind is the regular fsck which occurs on ext3 filesystems, but not on reiserfs, what's the reason for the difference, and is it this that somehow makes reiserfs less robust? Also, if the filesystem is marked clean, and is a journaled system, what is the purpose of the periodic fsck?

I hope there's some fs guru around who can explain some of these interesting points to me...

Cheers

I am not a guru by far so I do not know the answer to most of your question. But if you would like to stop the automatic check after x number of boots you can do the following as root.

That check does not bother me on desktops and servers as the only time I reboot is when I do a kernel update. But on my laptop that check about drove me insane until I found the above. What really bugged me was that on one partition it checked after being mounted 25 times, on another 27 times, and yet on another 28 times. It would have been much more acceptable on the laptop if it checked each partition on the same number of mounts so I wouldn't of had to wait on so many different boot ups. Anyway the above command stops the checks and ends the annoyance :-).

Now I will watch for the FS guru to answer the rest of your post as I would like to know too.

George

Thanks, although I did know about that. I agree, on laptops it's very, very annoying.

Of course, it does beg the question, is it a problem to disable this check, what is it actually checking for?

Without knowing what the check is explicitly for, I wrote a script to effectively move the scheduled check to shutdown (which you may find useful on your laptop). I wrote it primarily for Ubuntu, but it should work on whatever you want, it does require you to be using GDM as your graphical login though.

...still waiting for that FS guru!