[GRLUG] WMNTUG Windows 7 Meeting

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> > Yes, these questions can be about as
> > annoying to answer as "how are you?",
> > or "What's up?"  But helpful to some of
> > us.
> Just to throw in my 2 cents...  ext3 tends to be the most widely
> tested of the Linux filesystems, and has the most capable fsck.  Other
> filesystems may be a few seconds faster in one way or another, but if
> you care about your data actually being there when you need it,
> there's no safer choice on Linux than ext3.

We used to be an XFS shop,  but with dir_index the single biggest
performance plus of XFS was gone [at least for us], and ext3 is better
supported with a richer tool chain.    Of course xfs.fsck is much faster
- it doesn't actually do anything [it admits that right in the man
page].  The equivalent is xfs_check / xfs_repair which depending on the
options and filesystem size can take some time to run.

For productive systems I'm more comfortable with ext3 at this point -
and it provides an upgrade path to ext4 which provides all the
advantages of XFS [most notably: extents]

If you have solid hardware and a UPS run ext3 as
"noatime,data=writeback" and you'll probably get nearly equivalent
performance.  And an external journal helps, just as with XFS.