Installing new harddisks...Questions about filesystems, labels and fstab
 

Hi all,

I just put 2 new drives in my machine. Maxtor and WD, bring the grand total of usable, but non redundant space to a meer 1/2TB. I was wondering what the "best" filesystem to use is. Now I know that this is a subjective question, and I am partial to ext3. Now when I create a filesystem, the -l option will allow me to put a label on the FS. Is this the same label I see in fstab?

Let me know your thoughts.

Regards,
Ryan

If you are willing to try it out, go for XFS. I've used it in the past with no problems, but that doesn't mean there won't be. You could still use ext3 though if that's what you want. It really is simply user preference, but try out a few of the lesser used/mentioned ones to see if they are worth it.

What label do you see in fstab? There is an entry for a label? Here's an example, show me where I'd put a label:
/dev/hda1 /mnt/hda1 xfs default 0 0

I really don't think there is an option for it, but if there is, I don't know why you'd need one. Unless something like:
mount fatty
would mount the entry with the name 'fatty' attached to it.

It's probably just an entry for whatever program you are using to create the filesystem, and wouldn't necessarily register/matter when using anything but that program.

Cool

LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2

I think you are combining lilo.conf and fstab, unless you really pulled that from your fstab, and it's working. For more than 1 reason:
'label =' is seen in lilo to give the user something to choose during bootup.

/boot is not normally mounted with label=/boot (as far as I have ever seen in the distros I've used); and to further that, you aren't really saving yourself time, /dev/hdxx is just as easy to type.

Cool

I've never seen a need to put a label on the drive partition itself. Just cut the partition, make a directory to mount it to, mount it, stick an entry in fstab and voila.

To continue with what MasterC said, I use JFS on one machine, works brilliantly. JFS is IBM's donation to the world of Open source while XFS is SGI's. Since they are both moving their software bases over to Linux and slowly but surely dumping their proprietary Unices: AIX and IRIX respectively, their journaling filesystems are actually a lot more mature than Linux's: Reiser and Ext3. Offhand I thing MasterC is right in that XFS is further along in working 100% under Linux than JFS.

Cheers,

Finegan

Thanks for your input. Would I have to recompile my kernel in order to use either XFS or JFS? The drives are going to be media drives, mostly music and video. Should the choice of a filesystem depend on the content of the partition?