wtf, XFS is noisy!

c0balt · Guru Joined: 04 Jul 2004 Posts: 441 Location: Germany

i know this sound awkward but XFS is noisy

i ran the following small script today to get a glimpse of fs speed

AlterEgo · Veteran Joined: 25 Apr 2002 Posts: 1619

Dunno about xfs, but I am very sure reiser4 is a lot less noisy than reiser 3.6. The difference is striking, one more reason to upgrade.

c0balt · Guru Joined: 04 Jul 2004 Posts: 441 Location: Germany

i wasnt aware until now that filesystems can have an effect on the noise level of the harddrive

im thinkinig about trying JFS, is it as good as XFS for big files?

Gentree · Posted: Sat Jul 24, 2004 9:49 pm Post subject:

The noise your are refering to is probably head movement. So the way each fs orders, buffers its writes would have an effect. Since deleting a file is just removing a node this will vary greatly.

Perso , I have a 80G Seagate Baracuda that is so quiet I thought it was broken when I first used it! so I did notice any diff when recently doing similar tests.

BTW got any results?

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c0balt · Guru Joined: 04 Jul 2004 Posts: 441 Location: Germany

Gentree · Posted: Sat Jul 24, 2004 10:58 pm Post subject:

Maybe you should do a "big file" bench as well.

I may be worth thinkinga about the noise issue. This must translate to disk wear.

Test r4 vs jfs on the big files you want that partition for and wiegh the possible speed gain of jfs against being nice to your hardware.

Just a thought.

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c0balt · Guru Joined: 04 Jul 2004 Posts: 441 Location: Germany

well, i dont really think that the noise is a sign for slowly damaging the HD (my old 6GB hd runs since some years with even more noise)

and using reiser4 over JFS because of the noise level is just like buying a sports car and then being afraid to drive it at high speed because the enginge gets loud

and benching for big files just seems not worth the time, a comprehensive test between JFS/XFS/ReiserFS/ext3 can be found here:
http://linuxgazette.net/102/piszcz.html
i admit reiser4 != ReiserFS but as i store important data on that partition, id rather see a slightly slower JFS on it than a development version of reiser4
(many people seem to have problems with reiser4)

Gentree · Posted: Sat Jul 24, 2004 11:39 pm Post subject:

I'm not saying noise dB = wear in comparing differnet drives , what I meant was head movement = wear. So , if R4 is quieter on a given drive it is stressing it less.

Fair point about data integrity if you dont have comfidence in R4. It IS still experimental , however I feel some people are a bit too quick to slag it off .

I and many others have used it without pbs. I have used 2.6.6-love4 with r4 for serveral months and use it heavily.

I have just been recommended by 'thebell' that 2.6.7-love7 is equally reliable . I believe he is involved in working on gcc 3.5 so he knows his stuff and certainly uses his system for more than email! He is totally R4 for months as well.

I think the key to safe r4 is choise of a suitable kernel HTH.

However, if you prefer to sit at the lights revving your engine please dont let me put you off! :wink:

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u2mike · Apprentice Joined: 06 Nov 2003 Posts: 209

Ya, the best way to test filesystems is make a partition for each one on the same drive. Then fill them with files and directories, then bench them and see what happens.

Noise does indicate more disk wear (maby not a huge amount), noise is caused by movement(no, they didn't put a loud speaker on your HDD) and movement causes friction which in turn tends to wear stuff down

And as a previos user mentioned, if anyone's in the market for low noise harddrives seagate rules. I have a segate 80GB and a maxtor 80GB, the segate you can't hear, the maxtor is always roaring away whenever I'm doing anything on it.

c0balt · Guru Joined: 04 Jul 2004 Posts: 441 Location: Germany

sindre · Guru Joined: 01 Nov 2002 Posts: 315 Location: Norway

ledskof · Apprentice Joined: 22 Oct 2002 Posts: 209

I've been using Reiser4 for over a year. (Maybe much more than a year)
The only problems I've had were:

1. a system freeze which was like 5 minutes after I changed a system over to Reiser4. I had to come back up and do a scan to fix the partition. No files were lost. But the system was still unstable. I had to wait for the next patch and reiser4progs before using reiser4 again.

2. I stopped keeping up with the reiser4 threads and one day just started using a newer reiser4 patch. I had a system freeze, restarted and needed a scan. I fscked the files and lost every file name. There was no data loss, just file names.

If you are going to use reiser4, you need to keep up with what's going on with it before changing to a new kernel patch. I've been through 3 instances of hearing "the layout isn't going to change again", then it changed and I had to rebuild my reiser4 partitions. (althought I really think it's frozen now... I might have said this before though)

HTH = Hope This Helps

Marctraider · Guru Joined: 24 Dec 2003 Posts: 387

Topicstarter: i agree, xfs is much more noisy (and much slower with small files) then reiserfs and ofcourse reiser4.

And imo linux has very much small files, and alot of files ;)
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thechris · Veteran Joined: 12 Oct 2003 Posts: 1203

JFS is still a bit buggy. there is a char2uni issue that needs to be fixed or some ebuilds will fail... This doens't apply to all partitions unless you want to extract files with odd characters. there is a potential fix, but I couldn't get it to work. I may switch over to r4 in a while, but xfs is working just fine now.