The Filesystem choice thread - Part 2

DigitalCorpus · Apprentice Joined: 30 Jul 2007 Posts: 283

I'm using kernel 2.6.28 patched with Reiser4. I've had two crashes in 2.6.29 so I never made the jump with it on my server. I'm considering waiting until 2.6.30 becomes stable due to revisions in Ext4 and Btrfs and CFQ. I remember reading that Reiser4 will go mainline in late summer too but that will probably be 2.6.31.

I'm at a technical limitation due to the fact that I have nearly 1.4TB of data that I need a place to store it on. I have 2x1.5TB drives, a 1TB drive and a 500GiB partition on my boot drive. I haven't moved to LVM because I haven't committed to a filesystem to use. I'm not sure if I should commit and on just two of my drives and then shuffle everything over when 2.6.30 becomes stable or just wing it on regular partitions/disks until it goes stable.

Aside from bonnie++, are there any other benchmark programs that can give me latency readings?
_________________
Atlas (HDTV PVR, HTTP & Media server)
http://mobrienphotography.com/

ferrelas · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Jun 2008 Posts: 109

I've built a software RAID array and I'll be doing it again in the future, but I have one question tho. I read a thread about sw RAID not getting along with ext3, so I formatted the array with xfs. Is the problem still there or is it solved? And what about ext4 btrfs and nilfs?

gringo · Advocate Joined: 27 Apr 2003 Posts: 3793

which thread ?
i´ve been using sw raid and ext3 (and xfs too) for years now and had no troubles at all.

cheers
_________________
Error: Failing not supported by current locale

aidanjt

ferrelas · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 14 Jun 2008 Posts: 109

Are the performance issues there in ext4 as well?

I first found out about this from a warning on the gentoo wiki article on software raid and it linked to this thread.

While on the topic of raid, can you add disks to an array (raid5) that's formated and has data on the file systems?

aidanjt · Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 1:36 am Post subject:

Captain Newbie · Apprentice Joined: 22 Dec 2006 Posts: 182 Location: Socal

desultory · Bodhisattva Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 9410

Merged the six preceding posts.

keola · n00b Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 53

Hey... I'm not going to bore you all with how I ended up with a 1tb NTFS partition, but I have 800gb of data on it. I think between cleaning and all my other hd's I can back it up temporarily...

The system is a PowerEdge 2850 (Dual Xeon 3ghz, 4gb ram 6x300gb u320 scsi) - The 1tb part is a raid5 and this is where I store all of my important stuff. I currently use ntfs3g and it works great, well better than a virtual xp machine sharing the drive via cifs!

Since ntfs3g is a usermode driver, I know I will get better performance with ext3 or another native file system. I have kept this as NTFS because it is easy to undelete stuff from it - this does not happen that often anymore though. The partition is constantly used to access HD video and hi-res pictures and cd images with about 2 clients average. Performance is ok I guess.

I would like to ask if this was your setup, would you stick with ntfs3g or would you convert it and if so, what filesystem would you use? This machine also has a hefty ups unit and does shutdown when things get critical.

Thanks!

drwook · Veteran Joined: 30 Mar 2005 Posts: 1324 Location: London

I'd consider XFS personally. But TBH if it ain't broke and there are no complaints I might be inclined to save the move for hardware refresh - how long are you going to have that box around?

Assuming an alternative redundant box with enough storage (or a SAN) hanging around is an over-optimistic thought....

keola · n00b Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 53

Well I am moving the data off the drive now. I plan to keep this box as my gentoo server until it dies lol.. it's about 5 years old already but it has only had a good three years of use. It's a dell PE2850 btw. So it should work as my router / firewall / web server for many years.

Once my unemployment streak ends, I plan to get an single 1tb external to do nightly backups on.

You are the first to mention xfs - I see a lot of buzz about it in #gentoo. I was going to go with ext3 just because we know it is solid, but I will look into xfs while I am waiting for my data to copy over.

Thanks!

Sysa · Apprentice Joined: 16 Mar 2005 Posts: 161 Location: Europe

keola · n00b Joined: 22 Feb 2005 Posts: 53

I have had horrible experiences with reiserfs (v3) never used v4 for this reason. I did a lot of google and decided to go with xfs, it looks best for my applications. For some reason I thought XFS was new - but then I remember seeing it in the kernel for quite a while now. I still have a few hours, many hours it looks before I get the data off. So until then, I am still open to comments and suggestions.

Thanks!

AaronPPC · Guru Joined: 29 May 2005 Posts: 522 Location: Tucson, AZ

If you go with XFS, make sure you defrag regularly. I use XFS on my media drive on my MythTV box and it fragments as bad as any Windows filesystem.

Defragging is easily handled, though. Just make it a cron job. The volume doesn't even need to be umounted.
_________________
--Aaron

desultory · Bodhisattva Joined: 04 Nov 2005 Posts: 9410

Merged the six preceding posts.

Sysa · Apprentice Joined: 16 Mar 2005 Posts: 161 Location: Europe

tnt · Veteran Joined: 27 Feb 2004 Posts: 1222

I've started a new thread, but it was marked as duplicate of this one, so...
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=6080670#6080670

Colt45 · Posted: Tue Dec 15, 2009 11:43 am Post subject:

I have a 10GB HD Im going to add to my home server for caching proxy storage. What would be the best FS for this? Obviously a lot of random reads/writes and data reliability is not too important. Also, Im running CFQ I/O scheduler, would deadline or anticipatory be better?

regomodo · Guru Joined: 25 Mar 2008 Posts: 445

myceliv · Apprentice Joined: 29 Nov 2007 Posts: 178

Still hard to beat for so many purposes... is good old not so sexy ext3. (link is some recent Phoronix benchmarks)

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Tue Dec 15, 2009 8:36 pm Post subject:

Colt45 · Posted: Tue Dec 15, 2009 9:30 pm Post subject:

lord_sesshomaru · n00b Joined: 19 Sep 2007 Posts: 3 Location: Prague

Hi,
I have a new 1,5 TB extrernal hard drive and I am not sure what fs to put on it. Any ideas?

The disk is mainly for archiving - putting a lot of files there (typically with sizes from hundreds megabytes to several gigabytes), and reading them from time to time. Intensive usage or many parallel access are not planned. I don't see usage for any fancy features in this setup so even basic filesystem could do the work. My concerns are about overhead - I don't want to spend my precious disk space on fs datastructures.

What is good fs for this use case? Does anybody know of some benchmarks how much space does different fs take?

d2_racing · Posted: Sun Jun 27, 2010 8:37 pm Post subject:

Well, I know that there's a lot of people here that use this :

ext3,ext4 and reiserfs4.

If you want to be safe, you can go with ext3, it's an old fs that proved to be good.