[NTLUG:Discuss] picking a filesystem in 2006...

[Mike Hart]

I personally haven't had a ext2 filesystem fail on me
since 1996 (plenty of system failures that year of all
types caused by an 'almost' supported alliance video
card. the video card leaked  data and it leaked it
onto everything else.. modems, disks, serial mice,
files, etc. I only figured out what was causing it by
replacing hardware one bit at a time.) I note a
significant performance reduction with any filesystem
besides ext2. I would recommend anyone stick with ext2
+ regular backups to any Journalled or Virtual
filesystem, unless you must keep your box
up-to-the-minute backed up (like you accept credit
card orders.)  The performance hit for fancy
filesystems is just insane. 

Note that while I haven't had a filesystem level
failure, I do have data loss occasionally if I don't
do a fsck fairly regularly. I tend to leave my system
on, and I find that if I haven't rebooted in  2+
weeks, I'm likely to have files with issues when I do
reboot. These tend to be logfiles when it happens. 

Even considering the occasional corrupt file, I prefer
rip/encode at 10x or better on ext2 (the limit of the
CD drive) to the 2-4x CD rip speed I get whatever
fancy filesystem I use. The seconds saved add up
quickly with any disk intensive operation. (open
office starts in half the time, etc.

When I'm bored because I'm waiting (say on amarok to
rescan my music collection,) I'll boost performance
more by turning off access time in the fstab. This
stops the system writing data when I'm just reading
the file.  Like I reallly need stuff like solitaire
and konquest stamped with the last time I started
them. 


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