A filesystem (for a slow machine) selection issue

[sn4ip3r]

Hi,

I'm soon going to (re-)install gentoo on my old thinkpad, it's a quite slow machine with 433Mhz Celeron, 64MB RAM and a (again slow hdparm ~9MB/s) 4GB Travelstar HDD. (I wont be compiling anything on this machine, I have already created most of the binary packages on my desktop machine)

My previous Gentoo installation on that machine used reiserfs as the root filesystem, but now I'm thinking that perhaps ext3 would be better because it is not so CPU hungry. Another possibility besides ext3 would be Reiser4, but again, I don't know if it works well on a slow machine with not much RAM.

So, what would you reccomend for a machine with limited resources, reiserfs, ext3 or reiser4?

btw. Reiser4 should not be a problem because I'm using love-sources.

Thanks in advance for any useful responses:)

[jmusits]

I'm running a Thinpad 600E (PII 366MHz) with ext3 and it is quite zippy. Didn't even notice a difference after upgrading from ext2.

Jason
_________________
If you got the DO RE I got MI.

--Jerry Garcia "Run For The Roses"

[slycordinator]

The main FS's I've used/looked at are ext2/3 and reiserfs.

Ext2 is the "tried and true" one and ext3 is just a journaled version of ext2. Journaled systems are better in that if your system crashes and must be started up from an inconsistent state it, checking the system is much faster. fsking ext2 and other non-journaled systems can take a while.

Reiserfs does than the others for how it deals with very small files. Whereas another FS may have excess space taken up that is unused, reiserfs doesn't.

I haven't used XFS/JFS/etc so I can't comment on them.

Oh and at this time I'd go with reiserfs over reiserfs4. I've heard that version 4 isn't really "production stable."

And I think I remember reading that ext2/3 weren't all that well-suited for extremely large paritions but I could easily be wrong.

And reiserfs is CPU hungry? I didn't know that.