Volker Armin Hemmann wrote:
Hi,
On Monday 08 August 2005 23:40, Alexander Skwar wrote:
Hello!
What filesystem(s) do you recommend for use on a notebook?
I'm looking for a FS that's fairly stable even if all of a
sudden the power goes away (battery empty) and one, that
also doesn't (overly) unneccesarily spin up the hard drive.
I don't think that I'll use Reiser4, as it's lacking an
online fs resizer. At least making the fs bigger should be
doable while the FS is mounted.
I do not have any direct experience, but from all that I read over the years I
came to this:
XFS is very fragile, when the power is failing.
XFS will replace damaged files with zeros
this is both not acceptable.
Reiser4 is alpha code in motion.
I would not touch it with a 10 feet pole at the moment.
Well 4 filesystems left ;)
In the last year, I have run XFS, reiserfs v3, and ext3 on my laptop. I
mostly agree with you, although XFS doesn't really replace entire files
with zeros, just blocks that have been allocated but not written with
actual data...so /var/log/messages is likely to get some zeros in the
event of a bad crash. Files that were not being written at the time of
the crash are not affected.
Having run them all, my recommendation (and what I run currently) is
ext3. My soundbite summaries of each are:
XFS: aggressively caches, so might give you some power
savings...although real-world savings are likely to be slight to none.
Nice features (the only one that offers a free defragmentation utility,
even if it is brain-damaged). Cannot be shrunk, only grown.
Reiserfs V3: Excellent performance for _some_operations, slower
performance for others. Also can only be grown.
Ext3: Best journalling options available, including full-data
journalling if you want it and do not mind the slowness. Otherwise good
performance for the opposite operations as reiserfs. Can be grown or
shrunk.
I do not know of any Linux filesystem that can be resized while still
mounted.
-Richard
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