which file system?

ancient_archer · 2010-03-27 13:04:53

Hello there.

Easter is coming and since I will have more time, I'm planning to completely rearrange all the OS.
Now I have Arch linux (which I love) on the last 2 partitions where the disk is the slowest I suppose.

What I want to do, is to backup my data, delete all the partitions and OS on Western Digital HDD and to set it up again. However, I'm not sure what file system to choose.

BTW, I have a bit modified Optiplex GX240 (P4 Willamette 1.5 GHz, 768 MB SDRAM 133, WD 5000 AAKB PATA 500 GB, Ati Radeon 9600 Pro + old 80 GB PATA Hitachi DeskStar

Particularly, I want my new WD 500 GB HDD makeup look like this and I want it to be very fast, yet quite reliable:

1.partition: Win XP - 70GB - NTFS - for games mainly
2) Swap partition - about 1 GB MAX.
3) 40 GB - Arch Linux - / - ext4
4) 30 GB - Arch inux - /home - ext4 - I would have so large because I would like to run Sun Virtual OS there...
5) 255 GB - no OS - it will be the partition for all my documents, films, etc. but I will use Arch Linux which will as my main OS - ext4/XFS?
6) 50 GB - Simply MEPIS 8.0.15 - / - ext3 - MEPIS in case some critical programme in Arch didn't work
7) 20 GB - Simply MEPIS 8.0.15 - /home - ext3

What do you think about it and particularly, which file system should I use for the Documents partition (5)? XFS or ext4? In the Documents partitions, I will have really heterogenous files - from documents having size between 32 kB - few MB till large 700 MB avi files and a lot of mp3s of about 5 MB on the average. I won't do anything special on my PC, just using it as an ordinary desktop.

And is the choice of ext4 for partitions 3,4 good?

And are there some tweaks for ext4 and especially for XFS to make it faster?

Thank you very much!

drcouzelis · 2010-03-27 14:41:46

I'm sorry, I'm don't know very much about filesystems, but I do know I like ext3. Here are my comments:

Why do you need 40 GB for "/"? I use 10 GB (and at least one Arch dev does as well). Sometimes 10 GB does get a little bit tight, but I think 20 GB would be plenty for the OS.

I recommend the pacman-cage script: http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=32483 It wraps your pacman database in an ext2 partition and helps speed up pacman usage, even after you install / remove many packages. The speed difference is VERY noticeable to me.

I used to have Ubuntu installed on a separate partition, just in case something didn't work. Now that I am super comfortable with Arch and it is set up really nicely, I don't have it any more. (I have Haiku installed ) So, you may not really need MEPIS now or in the future, especially if you have other things you'd like to use the space for.

n0dix · 2010-03-27 15:56:47

I'm using ext4 for all partitions of my system and i'm glad of the time boot (17 sec) and the reliability. Like it said @drcouzelis 40Gb to the / partition is much space, perhaps 20Gb you going well. With respect /home partition, depends on what you want to keep.

ancient_archer · 2010-03-28 09:54:17

Thanks to both for your tips. Well, I finally changed my mind and reduced in my plans space for all / to 24 GB. I think that it would be enough. But, I wouldn't like to renounce MEPIS since my 3d acceleration is only working there and I would need it if playing some games through Wine... Also, some software (like Gscan2PDF or perhaps SunVirtualbox + some accounting software) does not work correctly in Arch Linux , but perhaps I will get that fixed...

Oh, and drcouzells... thanks for mentioning Haiku... I've never heard about that OS, but I looked on their side and I would try that just for fun... It seems that it wants to react on some problems of Linux as a whole, but if only it were more than Alpha stage and had plenty of programs to run :-))

And one question for n0dlx: You said you had ext4 on all your partitions. So you haven't had any problems so far? I read some rumours (especially of older date) about ext4 not being 100% reliable yet and having some problems... Do you think it's true? Thank you.

Last edited by ancient_archer (2010-03-28 09:57:36)

drcouzelis · 2010-03-28 12:48:21

ancient_archer wrote:

Thanks to both for your tips. Well, I finally changed my mind and reduced in my plans space for all / to 24 GB. I think that it would be enough. But, I wouldn't like to renounce MEPIS since my 3d acceleration is only working there and I would need it if playing some games through Wine.

You're welcome! Also, I promise you, if you can get hardware accelerated graphics working in MEPIS that you can get hardware accelerated graphics working in Arch Linux.

ancient_archer · 2010-03-28 14:06:18

Well, drcouzells, I unfortunately must disagree with you. The problem is that my graphic card is ATI Radeon 9600 Pro which is not supported by ATI anymore. In practice it means that ATI Proprietary drivers for my Radeon 9600 won't work on kernels 2.6.27+ I think. So, if I wanted to have it work under Arch linux or any other distro with newer kernel, I would have to set up Linux kernel to the old one in pacman (kernel26-lts) + set Xorg to 7.4 at most. This I don't know how to do and I don't want to because it can seriously break my system.

But, so far, I'm quite satisfied with Open-source Radeon drivers, so no big deal

chrisb · 2010-03-28 20:45:11

I'll second that / only needs to be 10Gb easily
Use ext its got good performance, stable, common and easily upgradable
the pacman cage script should be upgraded to use ext4 with no journaling

Gen2ly · 2010-03-29 03:28:03

Why two partitions for home? Got a summer home too ? I'd create new users on both systems with a unique uid. Should be easy:

useradd -m -u 1050 -G audio,optical,power,storage,users,video -s /bin/bash user

Use the 'id' command and see what groups both your Simply MEPIS user has and Arch. Some people will tell you to use a lot of partitions, for me the more basic the easier to remember .

Oop, forgot to add. I'm using an older computer now that really struggles on the CPU bit. Been trying JFS and it's been a lifesaver. The bit about it using less CPU is definitely noticable here. I can't attest to integrity however, and for that I'd say ext4 from my personal experience.

Last edited by Gen2ly (2010-03-29 04:08:43)

ancient_archer · 2010-03-31 20:35:47

Gen2ly,

thank you much for your ideas (BTW, thank you all for your ideas )

But Gen2ly, I didn't fully understand your advice. I understood that I should create a common home for 2 systems (let's say Arch and MEPIS) and add a user with a unique id. But wouldn't it mess some things up? Like I mean when I would use a common home, and I will have an application X (let's say Opera) and I would access Opera once from Mepis and another time from Arch, wouldn´t it mess up the settings or I don't know what?
How do those two users solve the thing?

Or if I would use e.g. Gnome o both distributions, what would happen to the settings? That's why I want to have 2 separate homes.

Please correct me. I'm very interested in how to use just one /home partition without messing up the settings or having any problems with that :-)

Oh, I would think about JFS... BTW, I think that ext4, XFS and JFS are equally very good... so good that I cannot decide, perhaps in case of ext4 I'm a bit worried for the stability but I hope that it was the past and now there aren't any stability issues anymore.

Thanks a lot

Last edited by ancient_archer (2010-03-31 20:38:24)

Gen2ly · 2010-04-01 05:55:52

Yeah, you can have two different partitions for home, please be free. As far as settings conflicting, is that what you are asking? Never had a problem with it. You'll have to adjust your fstab in both distros. Like I've said I've never had a problem with it before. Good applications (and most applications in Linux are good at it) read a line in their settings, and, well, set . Now you may think that a new application in Arch may have new settings in a config file. But (like I said, my experience) the application loads the settings it needs and I've never had a problem with it. If unsure don't. Thing is in Linux what I've learned is love your configs. Might think it's easy enough to set up again, but time and memory can sometimes be in short supply. There's numerous guides around that can give more details, but realy if you're using Arch you should know how already . j/k.. sorta

fsckd · 2010-04-01 15:39:54

What are you going to put in your home directories that you need to allocate more than 20 GiB for each? If it's just user specific application data, I doubt you'll need more than a couple of GiB. Even better, don't have dedicated home partitions.

Ext4 has been pretty stable for a while. If you google, you can find a lot of comparisons.

ancient_archer · 2010-04-02 14:07:38

Well, thanks to both (Gen2ly and fsckd) for the advice.

I eventually decided to have one /home partition for both MEPIS and Arch with 2 users (Gen2ly, I think I understood your advice)

However, I need your advice in the following issue:

Now, my partitions look like this:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 15502 124519783+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 16709 25846 73400985 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 * 25847 60801 280776037+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sda5 25847 54304 228588853+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda6 54305 57497 25647741 83 Linux
/dev/sda7 57498 60635 25205953+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda8 60636 60801 1333363+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris

Now, what I want to do, is to delete all partitions except for sda1 (where I have all my documents now (the most important are of course backed on USB key though)

Then, after deleting those partitions I would like to create these new ones:

/dev/sda2 (extended partition with 4 logical partitions):
/dev/sda4? swap - 768 MB (I think that it's more than enough for a swap)
/dev/sda5? ext3/ReiserFS - 45 GB - /home for both MEPIS and Arch
/dev/sda6? XFS - 233 GB - common partition where some of my data (mostly films and mp3s)
/dev/sda7? ext3 - 58 GB - backup partition to keep most important files

After that, I'd like to move my documents,films, etc. from sda1 → sda6. Then, I'd like to delete sda1 and create 4 primary partitions:

partition 1 - 24 GB - ext3 - MEPIS - /
partition 2 - 100 MB cca - ext2 - that will be boot partition for Arch
partition 3 - 24 GB - ext4/ReiserFS - Arch - /
partition 4 - 70 GB - Win XP - C:

Now, my question is:

How all this (creating partitions like it is above) would affect my data on sda1 and how would e.g. Gparted renumber partitions? Is it safe to do repartitioning like I want to?

BTW, to answer the question of fsckd: Finally, I'll have one bigger partition for both systems. The reason why it would be so big (45 GiB) is that through SimplyMepis 8.0.15 I'd like to play some games (like DeusEx) and others throught wine. Reason why just on MEPIS 8.0.15 is that it is the only distro where 3D acceleration really works on my de facto legacy Ati Radeon 9600 (there are no drivers for kernels 2.6.27+ and Xorg 7.4+ AFAIK). Plus, I would like to have there about 7GB of documents + Sun VirtualBox + some reserve (about 25% of partition to avoid fragmenting). I've got quite a lot of space and I always want to have big space reserves to play it safe and avoid defragmenting.

Thanks much for help.

DSpider · 2010-04-02 21:31:49

Instead of keeping MEPIS I would suggest you create a 2 GB NTFS partition and install MicroXP. I believe playing games natively is much better. And MicroXP does it so well. Here's a suggestion:

2 GB NTFS - MicroXP
1 GB swap (if you plan on using VirtualBox with a "semi-full" XP - for apps and such)
10 GB ext4 - Arch / and /home

For storage you could use ext4, sure. But you could also use NTFS. I have a 20 GB NTFS partition set only for games. If you have a faster rig then you could probably amp it up to 50 GB. 50 GB for games is more than enough. The rest ext4.

I'm thinking of keeping / and /home together (because of the dot files) and the general storage separate.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-03-27 13:04:53

which file system?

#2 2010-03-27 14:41:46

Re: which file system?

#3 2010-03-27 15:56:47

Re: which file system?

#4 2010-03-28 09:54:17

Re: which file system?

#5 2010-03-28 12:48:21

Re: which file system?

#6 2010-03-28 14:06:18

Re: which file system?

#7 2010-03-28 20:45:11

Re: which file system?

#8 2010-03-29 03:28:03

Re: which file system?

#9 2010-03-31 20:35:47

Re: which file system?

#10 2010-04-01 05:55:52

Re: which file system?

#11 2010-04-01 15:39:54

Re: which file system?

#12 2010-04-02 14:07:38

Re: which file system?

#13 2010-04-02 21:31:49

Re: which file system?

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