Filesystems for new hard disk drive

[Andrew E Mileski]

François Jacques wrote:
> You previously wrote that XFS is more trouble than its worth... What's
> problematic with it? I've read about some pretty bad partition corruption
> issues that were reported; is it what you were thinking of?

The problem is meta-data only journaling.

After a crash or power intrruption, ReiserFS can suffer from old data
blocks mixed with current ones.  XFS will have zero filled blocks (1.0
is really bad, and 1.1 is supposed to be "better", but it isn't cured).
At the office we are moving away from XFS since it is just causing too
many headaches.  We are shipping products with ext3.

With ext3, the default mode is ordered meta-data.  The CHANGES file
states:
  "Only journals metadata changes, but data updates are flushed to
   disk before any transactions commit. Data writes are not atomic
   but this mode still guarantees that after a crash, files will
   never contain stale data blocks from old files."
Full journalling can also be enabled, but I've never noticed an
advantage to it:
  "Journals all data and metadata, so data is written twice. This
   is the mode which all prior versions of ext3 used."

--
Andrew E. Mileski
NetWInder.ORG