Arch Linux

solarwind

Member

From: Toronto

Registered: 2008-03-18

Posts: 546

XFS To Store?

I'm planning on formatting a huge hard drive with an XFS partition to store all my photos, movies, iso files and generally large files. Is this a good idea? Would there be another filesystem more suitable? Would XFS lose data if I do an unclean shutdown? <-- That's my biggest fear. I would really hate to use NTFS.

verve

Member

Registered: 2008-09-08

Posts: 30

Re: XFS To Store?

I'm almost sure ext3 has the same benefit as ntfs for forced shutdowns.

AsA

Member

From: Milan - Italy

Registered: 2008-10-05

Posts: 40

Re: XFS To Store?

ext3 is proven to be a rock-solid fs, you don't have to fear unclean shutdowns.
xfs should be as secure as ext3, but is less used and so not user-tested as ext3. Otherwise xfs would be a lot faster managing huge iso files.

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meandean

Member

Registered: 2008-06-24

Posts: 67

Re: XFS To Store?

Any of them MAY lose newly created data if a file is open and being changed when a unclean shutdown occurs. The important thing is that the file itself (sans changes) is not corrupted and unusable.

You may want to look at the what each filesystem actually journals and how to tweak that.

I would think any of the newer filesystems would be fine for storage stuff. None of them are a substitute for a known-good backup anyway.

The most used and therefore the most well-tested filesystem is ext3 so you probably cant go wrong with ext3. For what it is worth, I experience a good number of unclean shutdowns and have never had a problem with ext3, jfs, or even reiser (since 2.6 kernels).

Do some testing yourself. Nothing better for 'proof' than experience.

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lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: XFS To Store?

With unclean shutdown XFS might lose data of programs which "incorrectly" (there's some informative post on that on some mailing list) handle (config) files, e.g. it happens to me with amule config file and sometimes I lose some KDE settings. Obviously, you won't lose anything that's properly written to the disk. In my opinion, XFS is just perfect for a data partition with non-small files, especially due to its superior fragmentation handling.

perbh

Member

From: Republic of Texas

Registered: 2005-03-04

Posts: 765

Re: XFS To Store?

If you have a 100+ giga filesystem - give me reiserfs/xfs _any_ day (rather than ext3).
ext3 is so s-l-o-w to format and even slower to do a mass delete - just try it out for yourself -
ie fill the filesystem with loads of 1-giga files, then delete the files afterwards - that's when you find out which one to use (or not to use).

the easiest way to accomplish it -
1) cd my_data
2) mkdir testdir; cd testdir
3) dd if=/dev/urandom bs=4M count=250 of=giga-1
4) for i in `seq 2 100`; do cp giga-1 giga-$i; done

Now you have 100 1-giga files there, you really should time it - use the 'date' command before and after the 100 copies
Then you delete them all with 'rm giga-*' and again - time it.

Try all 3 filesystems this way and you will have a good indication of their performance.
Mind you - you will probably be so fed up over the time ext3 takes to _make_ a filesystem in the first place, that you decide to scrap it forever.

Last edited by perbh (2008-10-07 17:48:30)

Misfit138

Misfit Emeritus

From: USA

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 4,189

Re: XFS To Store?

Right tool for the right job. Though ext3 does offer true data-mode journaling, (not by default), providing the highest level of protection, it will tend to be very slow compared to XFS or JFS with ordered mode journaling.
JFS ftw.

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kjon

Member

From: Temuco, Chile

Registered: 2008-04-16

Posts: 398

Re: XFS To Store?

xfs is fine for me. mkfs.xfs -l log_size=128m, mount /path/to/dev /mountpoint -o noatime,nodiratime,logbufs=8
and that's it. Those tweaks are excellent to maximize xfs performance with *any* kind of file.

** Somewhere I read that xfs metadata handling sucks, and that might explain why the crappy performance when operating on many small files (read /usr/src, for example).
When the logsize is fine-tuned, and the logbufs are increased, these effects are minimized.

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