With ext2, a power outage can render things unreadable
Worrying :?
So why would people still use ext2? Are there any advantages to using it?
]]>(I speak from experience... That's why I will never, ever make a separate boot partition formatted in ext2.)
]]>ext3 still has some tricks left that most people don't know about and it's been around long enough that most of these things are worked out.
I guess you're right Bertus... the excellent speed tip from Gullible makes ext3 a whole lot more appealing
What are the advantages of having a journaling file system? Is it just that, because all changes to be written are queued in a file, if things go wrong then the filesystem can pick up where it left things?
]]>What's the word on reiser4? It supposed to be as good as it makes itself out to be?
Right now reiser4 is caught up in heated battle between Hans and the kernel dev team. It seems that Hans thinks reiser4 should be merged just because it's here and the kernel devs think it needs to comply with written coding standards, be easy to maintain.
Personally, I don't care much for reiser4 anymore and prefer to stick with JFS or similar. It doesn't have any great performance improvements of other filesystems that I can tell and it has caused several instances of changes in the reiser4 code post-release causing partitions to be unreadable by newly patched kernels. As Gullible Jones said, ext3 still has some tricks left that most people don't know about and it's been around long enough that most of these things are worked out.
]]>if you use ext3, ALWAYS use the dir_index option when making the filesystem
That's VERY useful information GJ, thanks for passing it on.
What's the word on reiser4? It supposed to be as good as it makes itself out to be?
]]>A bit of advice though: if you use ext3, ALWAYS use the dir_index option when making the filesystem, like so:
mke2fs -j -O dir_index /dev/hdXY
With dir_index, ext3 is almost as fast as Reiser4 when dealing with very large directories. Without dir_index, it can be unbearably slow.
(If you don't wish to use ext3, try JFS - it performs similarly to ReiserFS, though pacman searches might take slightly more time. I would not recommend XFS unless you have a very fast hard drive though.)
]]>Cheers for clearing that up Andy.
Is there any linux app you know of that will enable me to non-destructively convert a partition from reiserfs to ext3?
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