Which is the best file system?

  • mick.ca
Posted: Mon, 12/31/2007 - 17:12
I have two external hard drives that house both my tunes and my studio recordings. When i switched from windows years ago i left the file systems (vfat32) in place. However, I have now come to a passing where these drives need defragging. So I have moved the data off these drives and wish to reformat them into something a LOT more linux oriented and less hassle than Micro$oft's fat system. After reading NUMEROUS articles and benchmarks, the choices come down to either ReiserFS or EXT3...both i have used and liked...however in the community's opion which is the best choice. Just asking what you use or what you guys and gals prefer. Thanks MiCK P.S> Happy Year Year fellow 64's
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Try XFS

  • osaeris
  • 06/14/07
  • Wed, 05/14/2008 - 15:25
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I have a seperate 200Gb drive formatted with the SGI XFS file system and the performance is great. Here's a WIKI article. This is what originally attracted me to try it: "For applications requiring high throughput to disk, XFS provides a direct I/O implementation that allows non-cached I/O directly to userspace. Data is transferred between the application's buffer and the disk using DMA, which allows access to the full I/O bandwidth of the underlying disk devices." In other words you roughly get the raw performance of your drive.

Reiserfs disaster

  • EmaRsk
  • 04/25/08
  • Fri, 04/25/2008 - 10:28
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I'm talking about some years ago, so things could be better now, but I had a massive data corruption with reiserfs (don't remember the details, but I lost an entire partition). I switched to ext3 since then and never got any issue. TIP: I use "noatime" in the mount options, it gives better performance.

Before installing ReiserFS

  • johne53
  • 10/07/07
  • Wed, 01/02/2008 - 09:29
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Before installing ReiserFS I'd advise you to read the wiki for its developer, Hans Reiser. Given the circumstances, it seems very unlikely that ReiserFS will be developed further... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser If compatibility with Windows is a consideration I'd advise formatting in ext2. There's a utility available for reading ext2 drives under Windows:- http://www.fs-driver.org/ I've used it for over a year and it's very stable. Also, the drive can then be mounted natively under Linux. ResierFS and ext3 are both 'Journalling' file systems - the main advantage of which is that they're quicker and more reliable at fixing corruption caused by a system crash / power outage etc. If you don't need that feature, stick with ext2.

file system

  • zenbrowncoat
  • 11/11/07
  • Mon, 12/31/2007 - 18:46
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Hello, Since I also play around with Dynebolic linux multimedia distro, I use Reiserfs. You have to have ext2 or reiser to install Dyenbolic on the hard drive. I personally have had good results with ext3 and reiser. The only difference I can see is that sometimes on a dual boot, which I have to do for wife and kids, Windows thinks ext3 is errors, where it ignores reiser. So in a strange way, I guess my vote is for Reiserfs, but not for any truly compelling reason. Cheers and everyone stay safe so they get to see the new year. John " There is no news. There's the truth of the Signal. Can't stop the Signal. "