hi,
I will format my two 200GB SATA drives that I have for storage from NTFS to something new.

These disks are for storage only and there will be 700+MB files and smaller like 4+MB files meaning (mp3 and some movies, all legally acquired )

So I was wondering what filesystem should I choose.
The first thought was for ext3 but after doing some search on the net I believe that JFS or XFS are better options.

Has anyone tried any of those two filesystems: XFS, JFS ?
I will be using kernel 2.6.x and x86_64 and x86.

Any opinions/recomendations/suggestions are welcome

my suggestion is reiserFS, it has been always kind to me and I feel it faster over ext3. I don't know for sure over XFS nor JFS. Though I manage a couple of Sun Solaris servers which have UFS, it's fast and stable as hell too, but I'm not sure if it can be used on Linux

I use reiserfs too. I've run into problems with ext2 and ext3, (Mostly I'm my worst enemy), and have found that reiserfs has the speed and stability that I'm looking for. It's journaling and security extensions are just what I need. Of course, for every GNU/Linux user out there, there will be an opinion. Do some research on the pros/cons of each.

yeah, i'd go for ReiserFS also...

then again, i'm just basing myself on the great experience i've had with reiserfs, it's not like i think the other ones suck or anything... in fact, i've never used JFS, for example, as i've never really had any need for it since reiserfs has always worked so smoothly for me... the only time i ever use something other than reiserfs is when i'm building a ramdisk or something like that with ext2...

just my ...

Reiserfs & Reiser4 tend to be more effective on small files, but are more CPU resources hungry at the same time.
XFS tends to be effective with operations on large files and has lower CPU usage.
Ext3 seems to be very polished(fast,reliable) in recent kernels.
I don't know JFS but benchmarks say it has lowest CPU consumption of mentioned filesystems.

It looks like optimal filesystem for storing huge files like video streams is XFS but I'd suggest to test all fs with own benchmarks because on different HW results my vary.

For a large scale file server like you are talking about, XFS is definitely the way to go.

It's performance with large file structures is unmatched, I noticed a significant improvement coming from ReiserFS.

I use XFS now on my 1/2 TB file server, and in the year and some odd months it has been up, never had any problems.

I deal with many ISOs (CD and DVD) and have a little over 13 thousand MP3s on the server, and performance with both has been just great.

Taken from this article on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFS#Disadvantages
The second one is the most distressing, and also the only other problem, and if you don't have a bunch of files exceeding 500+MB, XFS might not be the way to go. As far as I know ext3, Reiserfs, or even JFS should serve you just fine, I don't know what version of Reiserfs I have, I am just running the current version available on my Slackware10.0 ,2.4.26 kernel, and have no real issues I can think of with Reiserfs.

Other things I've noticed by living with both Reiserfs and ext3:

ext3 boots faster than reiserfs because it doesn't check the fs during boottime, like reiserfs does. In larger volumes, this can save you from seconds to minutes depending on how large the filesystem is.

ext3 journals both data and metadata, which in turn means that it's more fault-tolerant than reiserfs, but it makes the filesystem slower because it has to write twice as much as reiserfs.

ReiserFS, because its the only file system I found that managed to undelete from after a momentary lapse (rm -R /).

This site helped.

I have tried them both and my suggestion is to throw a coin in the air... They both are quite fast and capable, but I've seen that the tools for XFS are a little more mature than the JFS ones.

As for ReiserFS, I can't say for sure, but I have heard both, it can be a real nightmare or a precious dream.

Personally I trust more JFS in terms of performance (specially when compared with CPU usage), but XFS wins for me when talking about reliability, so it's actually up to you.

I vote for Reiser.

I read about FS benchmark in a linux-journal magazine. XFS is the way to go but reiserfs is catching up fast.

I am thinking of reiserFS but I haven't decided yet..
I read that JFS is kinda unstable on the linux yet and that XFS uses a lot of memory and it's better to be used with SCSI.I have SATA
I see some really interesting replies here

Any more opinions are welcome

I run XFS on IDE myself.

that's interesting. I would like to do it here too. Any tips or suggestions?