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As a side note on file systems. You should only use btrfs if you don't care about your data or you have a very rigorous backup scheme. It does not have a functional fsck, and is still experimental. From the benchmarks I have seen, it isn't even worth it for the supposed performance benefits.
There is a fsck, it's just not callead fsck.btrfs. It's called btrfsck. The RAID5 performance is better than the mdadm RAID5 on my machine. Backups are there and the unneeded stuff can go to /dev/zero if it should ever crash. I tried to crash it but I never succeeded.
I pulled the cable, cut the power, pulled the system drive when writing and it was still working after all that torture.
I don't care about a few MB/s write speed on a Samsung 840 Pro SSD in my Thinkpad.
But yes, it is still called experimental.
About a year ago, I bought a 2TB external hdd and formatted it to ext4. I was running Slackware 13.37 then and everything went perfectly fine until I upgraded my machine to Slackware 14. Occasionally, when I was using the hdd, it would suddenly go busy and I couldn't access the hdd or umount it until I plugged out the power and turned it on again. This happened a couple of times and thankfully I didn't lose any important data. After awhile, I realized that the error only happened when writing to the hdd. It never happened when I put "-o ro" option for read-only access. It might have something to do with the ext4 corruption bug with the recent kernel and I'm not sure if it's already fixed with the latest kernel that comes with Slackware.
Anyway, I've already switched back to ext3 -> works fine and pretty stable imho; never tried any other fs on Linux.
I use a combination of EXT4 for my /boot partition and BtrFS for my main /(root) partition.
BtrFS isn't unstable, in fact it's been very stable as of late. I use it primarily because it harbors many of the features that ZFS uses and is fairly well at preventing long term storage problems.
Other than that, unless it's a portable USB hard disk with a universal NTFS partition, then I use Ext4 for everything else.
Never had problems with reiserfs-3.6 and ext3 .
Old and worn out HDDs may break every fs driver .
Once i had the occurrence, that on one ext4 partition i lost all my browsers . My next HDD will have many ext4 partitions to try to reproduce such occurrence. Have tune2fs my partitions into data=ordered mount option mode for safety reasons. So far i have tested many hard poweroffs on ext3 , ext4 and reiserfs-3.6 and never had a problem. The reiserfs-3.6 partition runs very well though not checked for a long time now :OOPS:
Mount count: 205
Maximum mount count: 30
Last fsck run: Tue Aug 28 03:12:22 2012
I beg to differ. BtrFS is not stable. If you want to use ZFS, go ahead, it works.
ZFSOnLinux still isn't included by default for Linux systems including Slackware due to licensing issues, so using it correctly is a hit or miss with the kernel sources Slackware uses. Plus, ZFS in this way can only be used for data storage drives, not the main drives of your system. In short, it works, but it doesn't work equally.
BtrFS on Slackware is fairly stable and I have yet to have any issues with it and data loss or corruption. For now, I'm using it and sticking to it.
As for other file systems... I used ReiserFS (v3) up till about a couple years ago until EXT4 came out. ReiserFS is good but for modern systems it scales fairly poorly, and at times has started to have problems with data corruption and loss on several older systems I have. ReiserFS and it's successor, Reiser4, aren't even being actively developed on to further improve it anyways since Hans is in prison and Namesys is all but defunct as a company.
JFS for me is really flakey as a file system. I've had lots of issues with it.
ZFSOnLinux still isn't included by default for Linux systems including Slackware due to licensing issues, so using it correctly is a hit or miss with the kernel sources Slackware uses. Plus, ZFS in this way can only be used for data storage drives, not the main drives of your system. In short, it works, but it doesn't work equally.
For sake of truth, ZFS can be used for rootfs. BtrFS is constantly improving but I wouldn't call it stable. Maybe soon.
I found this article (guided of Linux Today), where it's made a comparison for performances between EXT4, Btrfs, XFS, and F2FS file-systems in the context of the 3.9 kernel' support for the mentioned file-systems. They used ssd and hdd as drives. You find there 4 pages with different scenarios nicely represented with graphics.
Me? Right now I got Reiserfs on my 3.10 Kernel Slackware32b. It's slow when booting, but out of this it's ok. Anyway, from that article xfs seduced me somehow, so that's my pc's future I think.
Have an eye on the link 'cause it's interesting, don't you think?
EXT4 and XFS are vary close in those benchmarks. XFS performance has certainly improved in leaps and bounds in recent kernels. This article is also an interesting for those picking between Ext4 and XFS.
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