Best filesystem for large partitions

[Knapp]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 9:58 PM, Preston Hagar <prestonh at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have an Ubuntu Hardy server setup with a 9 TB Hardware (Areca) RAID
> 6 array running Zoneminder (camera software).  For a while, I have
> been using XFS as the filesystem for the 9 TB partition because of a
> few random recommendations and outdated benchmarks [1].  Over the past
> year or so running with this setup, however, I have had to wipe and
> reformat the partition about 50 % of the time the machine power cycles
> (sometimes from unexpected power outages, sometimes from planned
> reboots).  It will come back up with an unmountable partition. I will
> try to do an XFS repair/check which will usually either run the
> computer out of memory (8 GB RAM) until it kernel panics, or leave the
> file system in a questionable state (it will mount, but if I do
> another xfs_check it immediately starts reporting errors).  I have
> just been reformatting the partition (and losing the past 2 months of
> security camera footage in the process).  Since we rarely have
> incidents at the office where the security footage is ever even looked
> at, it hasn't been a huge deal, but I am hoping to find something
> better.
>
> Partitions > 8TB aren't officially supported for ext3 (you have to use
> a -F force flag which makes me nervous).  ext4 isn't officially in
> Hardy from what I know and I could switch to Jaunty if it would be
> worth it, but will a "new" filesystem really be that much more stable
> than something like JFS or XFS (although it is built on ext3 which is
> what I normally use)?
>
> In doing a little Google searching I found the suggestion to use JFS
> on top of LVM [2].  The short how-to, however, doesn't suggest a
> reason why it is beneficial to put the JFS partition on a LVM virtual
> partition.  I have switched to that for now, but I was wondering if
> anyone had experience with large file systems.  I really don't need
> killer speed, and would gladly trade speed for reliability.
>
> If you have any experience with partitions > 8 TB and if you have any
> suggestions/tips on filesystems, extra tuning options, etc.  your help
> would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Preston

9.10 will be out soon and that might be worth upgrading too. Is it
long term support? I think it will have ext4 and grub2.

-- 
Douglas E Knapp

Why do we live?