which file system to use

[Tom Smith]

Tim Penhey wrote:

> On 8/3/06, *Tom Smith* <tom71713-ubuntu at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:tom71713-ubuntu at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>     Just for the record, I prefer to have a balance of stability and
>     performance--but I hold stability in much higher regard than
>     performance. For this reason, I decided to continue using the
>     tried and true ext3 file system. It's been around a long time, has
>     a proven track record of reliability, and has robust and feature
>     rich file system tools.
>
>
> Great, as long as you are not installing on a laptop.  As mentioned on 
> an earlier thread, ext3 does disk access every 30 seconds, never 
> allowing a laptop harddisk to spin down, and hence sucks the battery 
> life.
>
> Given that I'm about to install on my laptop, if not ext3, then what?

There was another post to this thread that suggested two ways to prevent 
ext3 from accessing the disk every thirty seconds--one had to do with 
atime, the other with logging (I don't recall the specific suggestions, 
but I think it had to do with a "laptop" package installation). Check it 
out, you'll find your answer.

Personally, I think the logging situation has more to do with ext3 disk 
access than anything else--and this would apply to any file system, I 
would imagine. If I look through my logs, I see "-- MARK --" lines every 
20 minutes in /var/log/messages, and cron jobs running at least every 
hour... I'm sure there are others that I've missed, but a lot will 
depend on how your system is configured.

So I don't necessarily think the entire problem (if any of it) is ext3 
as much as it is the services installed on the computer. It's the 
services that are making requests to write to the disk. ext3 (and any 
file system for that matter) just takes that information and does what 
it's told.

I'm certainly not a file system expert, but what I wrote above seems to 
makes sense.
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