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Which is the best file system?

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

‹ /etc/security/limits.conf : memlock disabled ? Choppy midi audio ›

file system

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. "

  • By zenbrowncoat at 12/31/2007 - 18:46
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Before installing ReiserFS

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.

  • By johne53 at 01/02/2008 - 09:29
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Reiserfs disaster

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.

  • By EmaRsk at 04/25/2008 - 10:28
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Try XFS

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.

  • By osaeris at 05/14/2008 - 15:25
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