New machine, looking for filesystem suggestions

scire · 2010-09-27 03:10:46

Hello everyone,

I'm setting up a new workstation tomorrow, and I'm looking for some suggestions from the community as to what I should be doing w.r.t. filesystems. I've been using Arch Linux for a little over a year now, and have been loving it. This is, however, the first time that I'll be setting up an Arch system since this one that I set up all that time ago. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, so thanks in advance!

0. I have a 1TB Caviar Black, a 1TB Caviar Green, and a 2TB Caviar Green. the Black is going to be holding my base system, and home directories. The 1TB Green is going to be holding a periodic snapshot of the Black. The 2TB Green is going to be holding media (movies, music, pictures, etc) as well as daily snapshots of my most important data. How should I be partitioning, and what filesystems are suggested? I am currently using ext4 on everything, and have not experienced a single problem; however I'm always reading that XFS for large files, ReiserFS for /var, etc. can noticeably improve system performance. Some people swear by JFS, and others wouldn't touch it -- and it seems like there is this sort of battle going on for all fs types. Does it really make that much of a difference in the end?

a few side questions, also related to setting up filesystems:
1. Is btrfs stable enough for safe use as a root filesystem yet? It seems to be quite an amazing FS.
2. Does LVM cause any noticeable performance hit? Given my drive sizes, I think I can be generous at first setup and shouldn't need to resize, though. Is it worth it "just in case"?
3. I'm backing up some important files to the 2TB drive. These files will (likely) not be more than say, 10GB. Would putting these on a separate partition on that drive be more secure?

And yes, I have done a ton of research on this in the past little while (and the last time I setup arch), there are just so many conflicting stories that I felt I needed to ask my own questions to people, not to a search box.

Thanks

Last edited by scire (2010-09-27 03:26:34)

karol · 2010-09-27 03:42:45

And you're likely to hear some more conflicting stories here ...
1. btrfs is still under heavy development, regressions happen.
2. If you're going with btrfs, you don't really need LVM.
3. Off-site backup is much better than a separate partition. Make it at least an off-line one.

ext4 on everything is fine, you don't run a High Availability service so you don't need to squeeze the last bit of performance from your setup. Just enjoy it :-)

codycarey · 2010-09-27 05:24:10

scire wrote:

3. I'm backing up some important files to the 2TB drive. These files will (likely) not be more than say, 10GB. Would putting these on a separate partition on that drive be more secure?

That's a copy, not a backup.

hume's doona · 2010-09-27 05:34:16

Since you have been using one distro for 12 months +, I'd say ext4 is fine, the only issue I know with it is that it doesn't handle reformatting as well as ext3 etc

enyaw_ecurb · 2010-09-27 10:51:41

Not a filesystem suggestion but a general one: Be aware of the alignment issues with the 4kb-sectors on the Caviar Green. The partitions should be aligned to 8x512 byte sectors. That may have more impact on performance than the fs.

Although I suspect you knew that already.

scire · 2010-09-28 21:38:55

Thank you very much for the input! I was delayed a day, and I'm just about to do my formatting.I decided not to go with btrfs, but I will do ext4 and reiserfs.

Thanks for pointing out that copying to another drive on my system isn't exactly "backup". While I realized this, I was just feeling that it would be a massive pain to be plugging in and unplugging an external drive every time I want to run a backup, which also makes it tougher to run as a cron job. If I want to backup properly though, I suppose that is what I will have to do.

karol · 2010-09-28 21:50:00

scire wrote:

Thank you very much for the input! I was delayed a day, and I'm just about to do my formatting.I decided not to go with btrfs, but I will do ext4 and reiserfs.
Thanks for pointing out that copying to another drive on my system isn't exactly "backup". While I realized this, I was just feeling that it would be a massive pain to be plugging in and unplugging an external drive every time I want to run a backup, which also makes it tougher to run as a cron job. If I want to backup properly though, I suppose that is what I will have to do.

I think many people can share a story of some company doing the same: keeping their back-ups on the same computer, sometimes even on the same drive.
It's actually not a bad idea, it's good for the economy, you know: data recovery specialists, litigation lawyers ... :-)

Off-line backups are a must, off-site ("in da cloud") are even better. Dropbox is quite popular cloud storage.

Evanlec · 2010-09-30 05:06:37

Personally I'd go with a Raid0 setup either with mdadm or BTRFS (btrfs can do raid all on its own).
Reasoning?
Hard Disk drives are Far and Away the biggest bottleneck in any modern PC.
they are infinitely slower than any other component.
So I choose speed when it comes to this.
Since I can see you're already investing heavily in backups, a Raid0 is really not that risky... (raid0 the two 1TB drives, leave the 2TB for backups and media)

scire · 2010-10-02 00:43:05

Thanks for the suggestions guys!

A little update: I decided to go with LVM on the Caviar Black, I figured that's where I was going to put / and my home folders, etc. I did an ext2 boot partition, a /var and /tmp with reiser, and /home and / with ext4.

Two days later, I got a reiserFS error "reiserfs error (device dm-0)" flashing up on my screen, and now I can't boot into it. getting a boot device error, and cfdisk is seeing it as having a 3GB NTFS partition, and a gig or something free space. I don't know what's going on there, especially considering I left about 800G free in the first place. Thank goodness I was taking my time setting things up, and I didn't get too invested in it yet.

Any suggestions what my next step should be?

Arch Linux

#1 2010-09-27 03:10:46

New machine, looking for filesystem suggestions

#2 2010-09-27 03:42:45

Re: New machine, looking for filesystem suggestions

#3 2010-09-27 05:24:10

Re: New machine, looking for filesystem suggestions

#4 2010-09-27 05:34:16

Re: New machine, looking for filesystem suggestions

#5 2010-09-27 10:51:41

Re: New machine, looking for filesystem suggestions

#6 2010-09-28 21:38:55

Re: New machine, looking for filesystem suggestions

#7 2010-09-28 21:50:00

Re: New machine, looking for filesystem suggestions

#8 2010-09-30 05:06:37

Re: New machine, looking for filesystem suggestions

#9 2010-10-02 00:43:05

Re: New machine, looking for filesystem suggestions

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