What's The Best Filesystem For The Given Criteria?

solarwind · 2008-04-24 04:04:33

What's the best filesystem for speed (normal desktop use)?
What's the best filesystem for data safety?

Under what conditions would a speedy filesystem (that may not necessarily be safe for data) cause irrecoverable data corruption? If a computer is shut down improperly, etc...?

Misbah · 2008-04-24 04:08:58

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Last edited by Misbah (2012-02-14 05:09:46)

iphitus · 2008-04-24 07:40:10

ext3.

search the forums.

solarwind · 2008-04-24 10:09:19

Misbah wrote:

This isn't really an answer to your post, sorry, more of a suggestion of a resource. I used this a lot in deciding what file systems I wanted for various partitions and purposes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems
As for speed for normal desktop use..
"According to reviews and benchmarks of the available filesystems for Linux, JFS is fast and reliable, with consistently good performance under different kinds of load, contrary to other filesystems that seem to perform better under particular usage patterns, for instance with small or large files. Another characteristic often mentioned, is that it's light and efficient with available system resources and even heavy disk activity is realized with low CPU usage."
As for security and data loss prevention, you would have to look into those yourself, I don't know anything about which file systems have those as their strengths. I know reiser4 supports filesystem level encryption, but aside from that, your guess/research is better than mine!

Thanks a lot!

Misfit138 · 2008-04-24 12:32:21

I wrote the filesystem explanation section in the Beginner's Guide to try and dissuade the "ricer" mentality, but I suppose in the grand scheme of things, there is no real harming in ricing.
There are a few simple principles to keep in mind, especially when considering Arch as your distro of choice:

The first partition is the "fast edge" of the disk.
/var contains your pacman db, with many small files.
ext3 has perhaps the most proven record of stability and data protection.

So in light of this, you could put /var on its own partition, sda1, using a high performance filesystem other than XFS. (XFS performs poorly when dealing with many small files). JFS or Reiser should work well.
If you find yourself with a small amount of RAM, and need swap often, put swap on sda2.
Use ext3 for data-sensitive partitions.
Put /boot on the last partition, since it is accessed for a few seconds only at boot time.

Or, you could ignore this and just put anything anywhere, and you probably wouldn't notice any real world difference.

Echo · 2008-04-24 13:00:38

The deciding factor for me anyway re: file system choice was the ease of resizing the partitions. This meant ext3 for me. The tried and true characteristics were also a consideration.

I wonder if the above re: resizing partitions is still true today.

bender02 · 2008-04-24 13:52:07

For ricers, reiser is not so good since the mounting time is about half a second longer than with other filesystems...

solarwind · 2008-04-24 19:53:16

bender02 wrote:

For ricers, reiser is not so good since the mounting time is about half a second longer than with other filesystems...

Don't care too much about mount times, it's the actual performance time really.

bender02 · 2008-04-24 19:58:11

Well, I'm pretty sure the time saved by having a leeetle bit faster filesystem is going to be much smaller than time spend researching to find out which one is *the one*.
But I know, we don't do it for the benefits, we do it for the perverse pleasure of doing it

iphitus · 2008-04-24 22:00:38

bender02 wrote:

Well, I'm pretty sure the time saved by having a leeetle bit faster filesystem is going to be much smaller than time spend researching to find out which one is *the one*.
But I know, we don't do it for the benefits, we do it for the perverse pleasure of doing it

True

solarwind · 2008-04-24 22:19:21

bender02 wrote:

Well, I'm pretty sure the time saved by having a leeetle bit faster filesystem is going to be much smaller than time spend researching to find out which one is *the one*.
But I know, we don't do it for the benefits, we do it for the perverse pleasure of doing it

Incorrect. I wrote a program that uses the disk intensively.

bender02 · 2008-04-24 22:32:55

solarwind wrote:

Incorrect. I wrote a program that uses the disk intensively.

Then you actually didn't ask a good question at the beginning at all. How does the program use the disk? Reading/writing a couple of big files? Reading/writing lots of small files? Reading and writing at once? For instance, if the answer to the last question is yes, then the significant speedup does not come from a filesystem, but from having two separate drives, one for writing, one for reading.

Allan · 2008-04-24 23:11:17

Misfit138 wrote:

Put /boot on the last partition, since it is accessed for a few seconds only at boot time.

I still put /boot first given a habit developed when dual booting windows...

I just had my hard-drive replaced and despite being exactly the same model, the speed is noticeably faster. I use ext3 but have a large number of big files and it gets quite fragmented (in the order of 15-20%). A "cp -ar ~/" from old drive to new and I'm back at 2%. I know jfs/xfs would probably be better for my usage but I like my data safe...

This ramble is to point out that you need to describe very accurately what your usage pattern is for us to recommend the "bestest" filesystem for your use. Even then, the "best" is not always the "best"!

solarwind · 2008-04-25 00:00:35

Well, thanks guys for the information. Looks like I'll be sticking with ext3 as it's working fine for me right now. Thanks again!

TjPhysicist · 2008-04-25 04:55:49

This is a related question so I'm just gonna put it here.

I have a partition I call "Backup" this is my D:\ from back when I had windows. The largest chunk of it is Videos (say abt 700MB to a Gig each average). There are a couple of smaller files, but 15GB of the 20 ODD used Gigs is the videos. I currently have it set to XFS, I have been wondering what is the real difference between XFS and JFS? And please, when you say "large files" large is a relative term. A lot of people I have talked to say things like "XFS is good except for hen dealing with many small files". What is a large file. So anyone can explain to me the difference between XFS and JFS and whether it will be worth swtiching to JFS. Note: I do use this partition the MOST. It basically got everything I use. (Well except my school stuff I put that on home partition done with EXT3 -- contains a lot of small files that i would DARE NOT EVER LOSE).

-Tj

Last edited by TjPhysicist (2008-04-25 04:57:03)

Mikko777 · 2008-04-25 11:08:08

Here's one recent benchmark:

http://www.jejik.com/articles/2008/04/b … re_raid_1/

My choice: stick with ext3 and upgrade it to ext4 soon enough. Shouldn't even need a reformat.

solarwind · 2008-04-30 05:33:15

Mikko777 wrote:

Here's one recent benchmark:
http://www.jejik.com/articles/2008/04/b … re_raid_1/
My choice: stick with ext3 and upgrade it to ext4 soon enough. Shouldn't even need a reformat.

When do you think ext4 will be out?

kezar · 2008-04-30 07:06:00

Isn't data loss on JFS a myth ? I use JFS on all my partitions for years and I never lost a bit, even after powerfail crashes.

Misbah · 2008-04-30 07:07:23

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Last edited by Misbah (2012-02-14 05:00:59)

pestilence · 2008-04-30 07:25:47

Reiserfs some years here...never had a data loss problem even on crashes...

Mikko777 · 2008-04-30 08:59:23

solarwind wrote:

When do you think ext4 will be out?

Kernel .25 onwards i guess...

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php? … 83#p361883

solarwind · 2008-04-30 12:10:29

Ahh. So I'm going to switch from ext3 to either jfs or xfs now. Which one do you guys think I should use?

dolby · 2008-04-30 12:22:23

zfs

solarwind · 2008-04-30 12:32:50

dolby wrote:

zfs

I'd really rather not.

kensai · 2008-04-30 12:48:04

Misbah wrote:

kezar wrote:
Isn't data loss on JFS a myth ? I use JFS on all my partitions for years and I never lost a bit, even after powerfail crashes.
ditto. I've hard to hard reboot and have had power go out, almost all my partitions are JFS. Never had a problem. Then again, never had issues with ext3 either.

Well, on my Gentoo system, power failed and in the next boot it complained about /etc/mtab being missing, but everything worked fine and that was the only time I got that error.

Arch Linux

#1 2008-04-24 04:04:33

What's The Best Filesystem For The Given Criteria?

#2 2008-04-24 04:08:58

Re: What's The Best Filesystem For The Given Criteria?

#3 2008-04-24 07:40:10

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#4 2008-04-24 10:09:19

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#5 2008-04-24 12:32:21

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#6 2008-04-24 13:00:38

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#24 2008-04-30 12:32:50

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