filesystems (was Data Recovery: professionals familiar with ext3)

[Daniel Mons]

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Paul Gear wrote:
> That's the stupid thing - it doesn't get constant removal.  It sits
> there online all the time.  I only change it when i swap backup volumes
> off site once per week.

Ah I see.  I assumed as it was a removable disk that it was in fact
being removed frequently.  My fault for assuming.

> It has been a very long time since i've seen a bug like that in the
> kernel...

While I agree entirely, the suggestion there was merely if you desired
to try a few things out to do some wider testing and track down the
issue....

> I have no plans to track any further.  If ext3 is reliable, i don't
> really need anything else.  It has been a long time since any of my
> systems have felt hampered by disk I/O.

...and it seems that you don't wish to, which is fair enough.

If the system is a low-use system (ie: only a few users, and used
infrequently throughout the day), I don't doubt that you are not
stressing the disk I/O.  In that case, I would also recommend sticking
with ext3 (as you've already decided).  It's "tried and true", and while
not being the best performing file system on the planet, certainly has
the fewest problems, and the largest volume of users/testers.

XFS is only recommended for those who are in fact pushing their disk I/O
to it's limits.  As per my previous email, the number of clients I
support who use XFS are far less in number (but far more in data volume)
than those using ext3.  But those who are using XFS have it for a very
good reason - because they need it.  I certainly don't use XFS for
clients who are low in staff numbers, or even in high-staff locations
that don't push their disk.  I had one client that was a 1600-staff
retail organisation sharing office documents and spreadsheets, PDFs,
digital photos, Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign files and
marketing documents, etc over Linux/Samba3.  Despite the large volume of
users, ext3 suited their needs fine as the file sizes were small (never
over 100MB), and the volume of traffic tiny over their 10/100 network.

XFS comes into it's own on 1Gb/s and faster speeds (bonded GbE with
jumbo frames, fibre channel, etc) when pushing large (500MB and larger)
files around, at consistently high rates.  As they say, if you have to
ask whether or not XFS is for you, it probably isn't.

- -Dan
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