after searching these forums and googling at large - i am still unsure which fs to use (i wont say best as thats subjective) for the past 18 months on various systems i have been using ext2, which i find to be solid but i dont like the 5% it takes and the fact the last time i had an error on my htpc box with the lvm it took near 2 hours to scan and fix it, i hear ext3 is the same only journaling is added - but same still applies as with ext2.

so my other options are reiserfs jfs or xfs, never having used these before i am wondering which gives the best performance for the 2 (poss 3 if i change the windows pc as well) i will be using them on.

pc 1 windows - dont know what i will do with it yet
pc 2 htpc - music videos poss odds and sods things on there like get an email or too - or poss start to use it as desktop
pc3 laptop - office related work

as i say i have googled and looked on here but am still not too sure which would be best for which pc - if anyone can advise me i would be grateful

The advantage of ext3 is journaling. Journaling results in massively reduced time spent recovering a filesystem after a crash plus you can still use all the ext2 recovery tools. ext3 maybe not the best performer but it is a solid all purpose so to speak filesystem. BTW 5% is a default value. You can use tune2fs to reduce the amount of reserved space at anytime. You can google and find lots of info on the various filesystem and how they perform. In general reiserfs does better with lots of small files. jfs does better with larger files.

This is usually a hotly debated topic.

For what it is worth, Redhat still uses ext3 on their enterprise systems where stability would be paramount. ReiserFS also gets good recomendations.

For your laptop ext2 will decrease battery use as the journal requires frequent hard drive use to maintain.

you two waited till i had formated the drives before you posted didnt u - didnt know you could change the 5% ext2 and ext3 took, might have to look into that

I'm still new but I had bad experiences after crashes with jfs or xfs; tho they were really really lightening fast. I'm sticking with ext3 on my / ; and reiser on my data drives. The ext3 seems really well supported by the boot process tools that Pat V put into slackware. It checks really nicely for me without me having to do anything if I crash, etc and the same goes for the reiser, it really goes thru the big hard drives quickly but to manually perform checks the commands are a little scary for me at my level and that's why I haven't gone forward yet putting reiser in my / yet. On my pc's that are under 600mhz, ext3 is my only option. My hdparm read's are really good on those pc's with ext3 but reiser is half the speed on those drives on old pc's. I've heard you can put some commands into the fstab to make reiser go faster, but again, I'm afraid of messing with data you know.

The only thing with the journaled file systems is to remember that you can't shred data on them.

see i have heard that reiserfs burns out drives :/ (option your after is notail - i believe) so many different filesystems so many choices, would it depend on what spec the pc(s) are as to what filesystem to use - or it a case of using what you think is right for you ? because if thats the case i would prob use ext2 (poss ext3 - undecided yet) on / as normally i only use 10gb for system harddrive and about 2/4gb for swap (double the amount of ram in the two pc(s) - so a fsck on 10gb doesnt take long - when you get up to a 450GB lvm you hit long periods of waiting time - hopefully i will have made my mind up before slack 11 is released (guessing i have a fair amount of time before that )

i have tools for gettong rid of stuff, 7 pass dod spec should be enough

i always use xfs

Interesting Follow up on this topic at Distrowatch with link to SuSe


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http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/2...it-default-fs/

ah fsck!!!! and i put resierfs on my laptop to test with - grrr, well from what i have been reading here and from all over the shop on the net maybe i will use ext3, but is there any probability that journal could be lost if there was a power cut or other such issue ??

also how do you get it to use less than the 5% reserve it seems to like, i have looked at tunefs as suggested, but in my still linux newness all the man pages look like they are written in some strange dialect ;p

better read somemore.. i believe the ext3 is not a true journaling fs.

have done some more reading as you have suggested and many pages seem to say that resierfs is not a true journaling fs, so am even more confused now than when i started - i should have stuck with ext2

Ext2 = Standard FS
Ext3 = Rugged Journaling FS
ReiserFS = Speedy Journaling FS
XFS = Quick and smart, but Gentoo believes it to be flaky ("fry lots of data" - hmmm)

one thing i forgot to add is that i need the fs to be able to handle files that are large 2gb+ for audio/visual storage of raw streams which sometimes can be rather large, so im guessing this will also sway the suggestion, also i am using a 2.6.17.13/2.6.18 - dont know if this will help

xfs is one of the oldest, fastest, and best journaling fs.

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/388
quote
XFS appears to be the most appropriate filesystem to install

http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html

@Carpo: is the 'notail' to prevent burning up drives?

"i have tools for gettong rid of stuff, 7 pass dod spec should be enough "

Same here, I just wish there was a way to do it when you were in the OS for a data file you want to get rid of. Well there's userspace and file encryption, but that reaches a point of energy in > energy out

no i think the notail option is just used to speed it up from what i have read - so far its looking like a toss up between ext3/xfs for main systems, poss even ext2/xfs, but have been reading there is a bug in one of the 2.6.17.x kernels and that you need to upgrade the xfs tools package to get things back on track - so might wait till slack 11 comes out b4 i install the systems again.

on a diff note does anyone know if huge.s has acpi support in it