Which Filesystem to Use?
 

Hello, and thank you for reading my post.

I plan to install Linux on an old box to make it an ftp server while sharing the drives to my Windows network. I understand that I can use Samba to share my data, but I don't know which file system I should format all of my drives as.

I'm not overly concerned with being able to use the drives under different OS's (provided I can still get to my data with a floppy should my box go down).

Does anyone have any suggestions?


Kevir

Sorry for the somewhat generic answer, but
threads with this (or very similar) contents come
up very frequently ... have a search


Cheers,
Tink

unless you will be PHYSICALLY connecting/swapping the actual hard drive between computers format all the drives as whatever you want, when data goes over the network it completely looses any data that is specific to a file system and they all use the network protocol maybe ethernet or IEEE 802.11g or whatever you are going to use and TCP/IP or netbios or whatever, but windows is native to these, and samba will let linux use the ones that linux can't already use, and makes no difference on the filesystem that the data comes from. Although don't do something dumb like formatting the linux computer as NTFS or something because it will just cause a major slow down in samba reading the NTFS and probably won't be able to reliably write to it either. So i guess format each computer with filesystmes that the computers OS will be able to read, but they don' tneed to support each other's file systems.

I tried doing a search, but the results seem to lean towards describing the mounts and directory structures.

I found a site that listed file systems like minix, ext2fs, and reiserfs. Is there a file system that is likely to improve performance for an FTP server, or should I simply go with the default file system with whichever distro I go with?


Kevir

I'd almost dare to bet that for an ftp server the
network is going to be more of a bottle-neck
than the file-system ;)

So basically yes, any old linux file-system will
do. You'll notice a huge benefit in speed with
many small files when using Reiser, though.


Cheers,
Tink