Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem, OT: Blender
Am Donnerstag, 1. April 2010 schrieb meino.cra...@gmx.de: thanks for all the input to all who have answered ! :) I will try to characterize (characterise ?) what I plan to do with my TByte disk. Characterise if you’re in British domains, characterize if you are in the US. Last thing: I have a lot iof copies of code from svn repositories because I like to have the bleeding edge of some projects (do you know the new Blender 2.50??? :O) I’ve tried 2.50 yesterday, but something’s not right here. Does yours run normally? When I didn’t get it to compile by hand (mkdir build; cd build; cmake ../; make), I tried an ebuild (also to make sure I have all dependencies). That compiled through, but the GUI is incomplete and buggy. I get lots of missing module bpy_types on startup, but the file is there. Do you have some hints? -- Gruß | Greetings | Qapla' I haven’t lost my mind; it's backed up on tape somewhere! signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 18:01:50 -0400, stosss wrote: I have been following this thread. I decided to research to do my own comparisons of ext3, ext4, JFS and XFS. Why have you ignored reiser3 and reiser4? The former in particular is widely used. -- Neil Bothwick Pepperami. Its a bit of an animal. What animal what bit? signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Friday 02 April 2010 14:45:29 Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: On Freitag 02 April 2010, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk [10-04-02 14:08]: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 13:04:53 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: only to be sure to have understood everything correctly: Suggestion is to create for example one root partition and a swap partion. And I will create on big rest of the disk-partition. The last one will be subdivided with LVM into portions as needed. Yes. Since the last big partition is big due to physical reasons (not for logical one): What will happen, if -- for example -- one portion will be not unmounted cleanly and while booting/checking fails to recover? Are all others damaged/lost? No, because the failure you describe is at the filesystem level. Even the volume containing that filesystem will retain integrity, only the filesystem itself will be corrupted. As you have left free space on the volume group, you can just create a new volume, format it and copy over everything you can recover from the broken filesystem before deleting it. Hi Neil, yes, sounds good, very good. Last question: How heavy is the performance impact of such a setup ? seriously lvm sounds nice. But it isn't. It easily breaks. Can you back that up with some facts? I use LVM on many machines and have never had it breaks. I'm also quite ruthless on some machines with how I use it - manipulating volumes with apparently gay abandon. I attribute this lack of failure to me understanding how LVm works and using it as designed, without trying to be cute and/or clever. You want a save setup? Go raid5 or raid6. As a bonus - you can get more space if you need it by just adding another disk. And you are not depending on some complex stuff to get it working. The various raid levels do not address the problem that LVM solves - how to rapidly create and manipulate sub-volumes. If your /var/log fills up, how would you add an extra 10G to it to gain breathing space without using something LVM-like (evms is for example LVM-like. So are the native HP-UX tools)? -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Friday 02 April 2010 23:28:26 Neil Bothwick wrote: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 21:50:09 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Assuming your controller supports hotplugging, assuming you have a drive available to plug in, assuming you are able to physically add a drive. sata can hotplug. all ahci controlers can hotplug and all sata drives can hotplug. If you insist on technology straight from the stone ages that is your problem. I'd like to see you hotplug another SATA drive into this netbook, whereas I can add another volume in seconds. I'd like to see him add another SATA drive to my nameservers sitting in New York or the vmhost in Nairobi. I'm in Johannesburg. Taking down that NewYork nameserver on a whim to add disks is not an option. It's an old machine, but a critical one and serves DNS to our entire European and US markets. Taking it down on a whim gets me fired. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Thu, 1 Apr 2010 21:09:30 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: So I have a lot of docs (specs of microcontrollers, howtos, programm and source code docs...etc) on my disk. This one part. Those are fairly normal files. Then: I often transer videos from my DVB-T-receiver/recorder to my harddisk to cut out the advertising and to transcode the videos to somethings better than ts (transport streams), These tend to be bigger, often in the GB range, so I'd use a separate filesystem for them with XFS, which handles large files better in my experience. Then I want something encrypted, either as a partition or as a files (carrying a encrypted fs), which I can copy to dvd and will be able to mount this dvd and use it without to have to copy the whole dvd first to harddisk before using it... Currently I am using encfs...(outdated?). What can I do use instead? ecryptfs does much the same job as encfs but is in the kernel. I'd say something like reiser3 for most areas and an XFS filesystem for the videos would be a good starting point. I would strongly recommend you use LVM and only set up volumes for what you need. That gives you extra space to play with and even experiment with different filesystems to see which work for you. -- Neil Bothwick The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk [10-04-02 10:52]: On Thu, 1 Apr 2010 21:09:30 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: So I have a lot of docs (specs of microcontrollers, howtos, programm and source code docs...etc) on my disk. This one part. Those are fairly normal files. Then: I often transer videos from my DVB-T-receiver/recorder to my harddisk to cut out the advertising and to transcode the videos to somethings better than ts (transport streams), These tend to be bigger, often in the GB range, so I'd use a separate filesystem for them with XFS, which handles large files better in my experience. Then I want something encrypted, either as a partition or as a files (carrying a encrypted fs), which I can copy to dvd and will be able to mount this dvd and use it without to have to copy the whole dvd first to harddisk before using it... Currently I am using encfs...(outdated?). What can I do use instead? ecryptfs does much the same job as encfs but is in the kernel. I'd say something like reiser3 for most areas and an XFS filesystem for the videos would be a good starting point. I would strongly recommend you use LVM and only set up volumes for what you need. That gives you extra space to play with and even experiment with different filesystems to see which work for you. -- Neil Bothwick The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant. Hi Neil, Thank you for your help! :) A question to LVM: As much as I know, LVM combines several partition to one big partition, and if one partition fails, at least other others of that volume are damaged, too. What is the advantage of using LVM and several small partitions instead of one in the size of the sum of the others and not using LVM? Best regards, mcc -- Please don't send me any Word- or Powerpoint-Attachments unless it's absolutely neccessary. - Send simply Text. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html In a world without fences and walls nobody needs gates and windows.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, 2010-04-02 at 11:11 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk [10-04-02 10:52]: On Thu, 1 Apr 2010 21:09:30 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: So I have a lot of docs (specs of microcontrollers, howtos, programm and source code docs...etc) on my disk. This one part. Those are fairly normal files. Then: I often transer videos from my DVB-T-receiver/recorder to my harddisk to cut out the advertising and to transcode the videos to somethings better than ts (transport streams), These tend to be bigger, often in the GB range, so I'd use a separate filesystem for them with XFS, which handles large files better in my experience. Then I want something encrypted, either as a partition or as a files (carrying a encrypted fs), which I can copy to dvd and will be able to mount this dvd and use it without to have to copy the whole dvd first to harddisk before using it... Currently I am using encfs...(outdated?). What can I do use instead? ecryptfs does much the same job as encfs but is in the kernel. I'd say something like reiser3 for most areas and an XFS filesystem for the videos would be a good starting point. I would strongly recommend you use LVM and only set up volumes for what you need. That gives you extra space to play with and even experiment with different filesystems to see which work for you. -- Neil Bothwick The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant. Hi Neil, Thank you for your help! :) A question to LVM: As much as I know, LVM combines several partition to one big partition, and if one partition fails, at least other others of that volume are damaged, too. What is the advantage of using LVM and several small partitions instead of one in the size of the sum of the others and not using LVM? Best regards, mcc The advantage is flexibility - you absolutely love LVM when you discover you have made a file system too small! Shrinking/enlarging/adding more storage etc is a real bonus. Downside as you mention is lose one disk and you may lose all - however I believe that sometimes the remaining data can be recovered. Also keep in mind that while small partitions can be a pain and waste space, normal corruption is limited to one partition, and physical data protection is better (i.e., when one partition fills up, others are safe) BillK
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
William Kenworthy bi...@iinet.net.au [10-04-02 11:32]: On Fri, 2010-04-02 at 11:11 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk [10-04-02 10:52]: On Thu, 1 Apr 2010 21:09:30 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: So I have a lot of docs (specs of microcontrollers, howtos, programm and source code docs...etc) on my disk. This one part. Those are fairly normal files. Then: I often transer videos from my DVB-T-receiver/recorder to my harddisk to cut out the advertising and to transcode the videos to somethings better than ts (transport streams), These tend to be bigger, often in the GB range, so I'd use a separate filesystem for them with XFS, which handles large files better in my experience. Then I want something encrypted, either as a partition or as a files (carrying a encrypted fs), which I can copy to dvd and will be able to mount this dvd and use it without to have to copy the whole dvd first to harddisk before using it... Currently I am using encfs...(outdated?). What can I do use instead? ecryptfs does much the same job as encfs but is in the kernel. I'd say something like reiser3 for most areas and an XFS filesystem for the videos would be a good starting point. I would strongly recommend you use LVM and only set up volumes for what you need. That gives you extra space to play with and even experiment with different filesystems to see which work for you. -- Neil Bothwick The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant. Hi Neil, Thank you for your help! :) A question to LVM: As much as I know, LVM combines several partition to one big partition, and if one partition fails, at least other others of that volume are damaged, too. What is the advantage of using LVM and several small partitions instead of one in the size of the sum of the others and not using LVM? Best regards, mcc The advantage is flexibility - you absolutely love LVM when you discover you have made a file system too small! Shrinking/enlarging/adding more storage etc is a real bonus. Downside as you mention is lose one disk and you may lose all - however I believe that sometimes the remaining data can be recovered. Also keep in mind that while small partitions can be a pain and waste space, normal corruption is limited to one partition, and physical data protection is better (i.e., when one partition fills up, others are safe) BillK Hi Bill, tahnks for your reply! :) Seems that that, what I thought to have remembered of LVM seems to be still correct. mcc -- Please don't send me any Word- or Powerpoint-Attachments unless it's absolutely neccessary. - Send simply Text. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html In a world without fences and walls nobody needs gates and windows.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 11:11:30 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: A question to LVM: As much as I know, LVM combines several partition to one big partition, and if one partition fails, at least other others of that volume are damaged, too. It can be used that way, but you have only one disk, so you would create a single physical volume from a large partition on that disk and then use LVM to create individual logical volumes within it. What is the advantage of using LVM and several small partitions instead of one in the size of the sum of the others and not using LVM? Flexibility and convenience. No single filesystem is right for all of your needs, with LVM you can use XFS where it is best suited and something else elsewhere, and you can resize and reorganise your volumes without needing to repartition the drive. I have a few hundred GB unused on my volume group, so I can add volumes or resize existing ones in seconds with minimal effort and no downtime. Just one note of caution, XFS filesystems cannot be shrunk, although they are easy to grow, so make any XFS volumes no larger than your current needs. That advice applies to all your volumes, because growing is easier and faster than shrinking, but doubly so to XFS. -- Neil Bothwick Better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk [10-04-02 12:48]: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 11:11:30 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: A question to LVM: As much as I know, LVM combines several partition to one big partition, and if one partition fails, at least other others of that volume are damaged, too. It can be used that way, but you have only one disk, so you would create a single physical volume from a large partition on that disk and then use LVM to create individual logical volumes within it. What is the advantage of using LVM and several small partitions instead of one in the size of the sum of the others and not using LVM? Flexibility and convenience. No single filesystem is right for all of your needs, with LVM you can use XFS where it is best suited and something else elsewhere, and you can resize and reorganise your volumes without needing to repartition the drive. I have a few hundred GB unused on my volume group, so I can add volumes or resize existing ones in seconds with minimal effort and no downtime. Just one note of caution, XFS filesystems cannot be shrunk, although they are easy to grow, so make any XFS volumes no larger than your current needs. That advice applies to all your volumes, because growing is easier and faster than shrinking, but doubly so to XFS. -- Neil Bothwick Better to understand a little than to misunderstand a lot. Hi Neil, only to be sure to have understood everything correctly: Suggestion is to create for example one root partition and a swap partion. And I will create on big rest of the disk-partition. The last one will be subdivided with LVM into portions as needed. Since the last big partition is big due to physical reasons (not for logical one): What will happen, if -- for example -- one portion will be not unmounted cleanly and while booting/checking fails to recover? Are all others damaged/lost? Best regards, mcc -- Please don't send me any Word- or Powerpoint-Attachments unless it's absolutely neccessary. - Send simply Text. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html In a world without fences and walls nobody needs gates and windows.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, 02 Apr 2010 11:20:02 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote about Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem: [snip] A question to LVM: As much as I know, LVM combines several partition to one big partition, and if one partition fails, at least other others of that volume are damaged, too. Disks fail. Sectors fail. Partitions do not fail. Logical volumes do not fail. If your disk fails you lose *all* partitions on it. If some sectors fail, the file(s) backed by those sectors will be corrupted -- regardless of filesystem type. If the defective sectors back a filesystem's superblock or other infrastructure, you could well lose the filesystem; but most modern filesystems keep redundant copies of their infrastructure, and fsck can sometimes recover. What is the advantage of using LVM and several small partitions instead of one in the size of the sum of the others and not using LVM? LVM provides immense flexibility in creating, deleting and expanding filesystems. Once you get used to using LVM, which is not difficult, you will never go back to partitions. -- Regards, Dave [RLU #314465] == dwn...@ntlworld.com (David W Noon) == signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 13:04:53 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: only to be sure to have understood everything correctly: Suggestion is to create for example one root partition and a swap partion. And I will create on big rest of the disk-partition. The last one will be subdivided with LVM into portions as needed. Yes. Since the last big partition is big due to physical reasons (not for logical one): What will happen, if -- for example -- one portion will be not unmounted cleanly and while booting/checking fails to recover? Are all others damaged/lost? No, because the failure you describe is at the filesystem level. Even the volume containing that filesystem will retain integrity, only the filesystem itself will be corrupted. As you have left free space on the volume group, you can just create a new volume, format it and copy over everything you can recover from the broken filesystem before deleting it. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk [10-04-02 14:08]: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 13:04:53 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: only to be sure to have understood everything correctly: Suggestion is to create for example one root partition and a swap partion. And I will create on big rest of the disk-partition. The last one will be subdivided with LVM into portions as needed. Yes. Since the last big partition is big due to physical reasons (not for logical one): What will happen, if -- for example -- one portion will be not unmounted cleanly and while booting/checking fails to recover? Are all others damaged/lost? No, because the failure you describe is at the filesystem level. Even the volume containing that filesystem will retain integrity, only the filesystem itself will be corrupted. As you have left free space on the volume group, you can just create a new volume, format it and copy over everything you can recover from the broken filesystem before deleting it. Hi Neil, yes, sounds good, very good. Last question: How heavy is the performance impact of such a setup ? -- Please don't send me any Word- or Powerpoint-Attachments unless it's absolutely neccessary. - Send simply Text. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html In a world without fences and walls nobody needs gates and windows.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Freitag 02 April 2010, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk [10-04-02 14:08]: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 13:04:53 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: only to be sure to have understood everything correctly: Suggestion is to create for example one root partition and a swap partion. And I will create on big rest of the disk-partition. The last one will be subdivided with LVM into portions as needed. Yes. Since the last big partition is big due to physical reasons (not for logical one): What will happen, if -- for example -- one portion will be not unmounted cleanly and while booting/checking fails to recover? Are all others damaged/lost? No, because the failure you describe is at the filesystem level. Even the volume containing that filesystem will retain integrity, only the filesystem itself will be corrupted. As you have left free space on the volume group, you can just create a new volume, format it and copy over everything you can recover from the broken filesystem before deleting it. Hi Neil, yes, sounds good, very good. Last question: How heavy is the performance impact of such a setup ? seriously lvm sounds nice. But it isn't. It easily breaks. You want a save setup? Go raid5 or raid6. As a bonus - you can get more space if you need it by just adding another disk. And you are not depending on some complex stuff to get it working.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, 2010-04-02 at 14:45 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: On Freitag 02 April 2010, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Neil Bothwick n...@digimed.co.uk [10-04-02 14:08]: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 13:04:53 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: only to be sure to have understood everything correctly: Suggestion is to create for example one root partition and a swap partion. And I will create on big rest of the disk-partition. The last one will be subdivided with LVM into portions as needed. Yes. Since the last big partition is big due to physical reasons (not for logical one): What will happen, if -- for example -- one portion will be not unmounted cleanly and while booting/checking fails to recover? Are all others damaged/lost? No, because the failure you describe is at the filesystem level. Even the volume containing that filesystem will retain integrity, only the filesystem itself will be corrupted. As you have left free space on the volume group, you can just create a new volume, format it and copy over everything you can recover from the broken filesystem before deleting it. Hi Neil, yes, sounds good, very good. Last question: How heavy is the performance impact of such a setup ? seriously lvm sounds nice. But it isn't. It easily breaks. You want a save setup? Go raid5 or raid6. As a bonus - you can get more space if you need it by just adding another disk. And you are not depending on some complex stuff to get it working. My experience is lvm itself is quite robust and very low impact on performance. More reliable than linux software raid at least (well the raid 0 that I was using: ) - never had a problem I could trace to lvm. The only thing thats affected lvm for me were hardware errors (disk died). My experience was with raid 0, while the higher raid redundancy will shift the reliability figures back the other way. Its really down to space and management or losing space to redundancy. Yes its an extra layer on top of the raw hardware (but so is raid really) so its the flexibility thats important. BillK
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Freitag 02 April 2010, William Kenworthy wrote: My experience was with raid 0, while the higher raid redundancy will shift the reliability figures back the other way. wrong. Raid0 is meant for 0 redudancy and reduced reliability for more performance. Before you start talking about Raid and redundandy you should read about raid levels and what they mean first.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
Neil Bothwick wrote: On Thu, 1 Apr 2010 21:09:30 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Then: I often transer videos from my DVB-T-receiver/recorder to my harddisk to cut out the advertising and to transcode the videos to somethings better than ts (transport streams), These tend to be bigger, often in the GB range, so I'd use a separate filesystem for them with XFS, which handles large files better in my experience. He mentioned in one of the first few posts that he regularly has hard shutdowns. I took that as pulling the plug. The last bit of experience I had with XFS, it does not like that sort of thing to happen. Each time I had a hard shutdown, I had to reinstall the OS. Has XFS changed so that power loss is not s problem or should he not use this after all? Would hate for the OP to use XFS if it has not improved in that area. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Friday 02 April 2010 16:28:43 Dale wrote: Neil Bothwick wrote: On Thu, 1 Apr 2010 21:09:30 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Then: I often transer videos from my DVB-T-receiver/recorder to my harddisk to cut out the advertising and to transcode the videos to somethings better than ts (transport streams), These tend to be bigger, often in the GB range, so I'd use a separate filesystem for them with XFS, which handles large files better in my experience. He mentioned in one of the first few posts that he regularly has hard shutdowns. I took that as pulling the plug. The last bit of experience I had with XFS, it does not like that sort of thing to happen. Each time I had a hard shutdown, I had to reinstall the OS. Has XFS changed so that power loss is not s problem or should he not use this after all? Would hate for the OP to use XFS if it has not improved in that area. XFS was ropey in its early days. I had to re-install a partition once too (on a laptop!). It is much more stable now (have not had a problem in the last 4+ years). reiserfs is absolutely bullet proof here, with hundreds of crashes on a machine that had bad memory (like twice or three times a day I would have to pull the plug, for months on end until I isolated the error on a memory module). reiser4 seems to be on a class of its own in terms of performance. Perhaps not as forgiving on hard crashes as the reiserfs? Not sure. It's early days yet on this machine, but I have only praises for it so far. I just hope they incorporate it in the kernel so that I don't have to manually patch it every time. This is just my 2c's - so YMMV. -- Regards, Mick signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 10:09 PM, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: [ ... snip ... ] So I have a lot of docs (specs of microcontrollers, howtos, programm and source code docs...etc) on my disk. This one part. I've seen that nobody mentioned JFS yet... :) In some benchmarks the best FS for most tasks is either XFS and JFS, but it seems that JFS has less CPU and memory usage. So for small and medium files I would say it's best. (I think it was on Tom's Hardware site?) I'll also describe my history on the issue: initially I've only used ReiserFS until something (not the hard drive) just snapped and I've almost lost all my data. At that moment I've migrated to Ext3. But Ext3 has the problem of needing constant (usually once a moth) checking (I know this is optional or tunable but it seems it is recommended) which for large file systems takes incredibly long (60GB HDD takes about 2 or 3 minutes... So imagine what would to to 1TB...) So I got angry again and moved to JFS... And I'm using JFS for about two years without major incidents... (Only once I've lost the contents of a configuration file due to a power interruption but this is because of the editor.) So as a conclusion for this task I would recommend JFS (I also have 200GB of documentation which covers about 100 thousand files I guess.) Also see at the end for my notes on journaled file systems. Then: I often transer videos from my DVB-T-receiver/recorder to my harddisk to cut out the advertising and to transcode the videos to somethings better than ts (transport streams), This is another part. Although JFS could handle this, maybe a file system specially designed for this would do best: Ext4 with it's extent feature. (But be aware that by just using a file system is not enough... The software also has to be specially crafted if you want high performance. Just see the `fallocate` and `fadvise` system calls.) Then I plan to have two roots this time: One to experiment with and one good and stable-version which is used/updated/... strictly as recommended. Filesizes and usage do vary here...take a look at your own roots ;))) :) This sounds like my setup: 160GB HDD from my laptop has the following layout: * GPT partition table (not MBR) -- this gives me more partitions without needing the extended partition feature of MBR; * 2 boot partitions of 512MB (maybe 1GB would have been better) -- one for current usage (Grub 0.97 with GPT patches) and one for experimentation; these are Ext2 for safety and compatibility; * 3 root partitions of 4GB (I should have made them 8GB) -- one for the current operating system, and two for future upgrades / experimentation; currently JFS and maybe also so in the future; * 1 swap of 8GB (encrypted with random password with the help of dm-crypt); * rest of the HDD as one big partition with LVM; (large extents 256MB); * from the LVM I have partitions for personal data (/home) and other things -- everything is JFS; Then I want something encrypted, either as a partition or as a files (carrying a encrypted fs), which I can copy to dvd and will be able to mount this dvd and use it without to have to copy the whole dvd first to harddisk before using it... Currently I am using encfs...(outdated?). What can I do use instead? This is for personal things like letters, photos, texts ... etc. Files vary from some kb up to about 2GByte (guessed). Most of them smaller than 200MByte As someone noted maybe EncryptFS (in kernel one) would be better... (It's an install option in Ubuntu so I would say it's mature enough.) But for this encrypted purpose I would use dm-crypt with `aes-xts-essiv:sha256` encryption. (In the past I've used LoopAES but I had some minor issues with kernel building as it's not in the vanilla kernel...) Last thing: I have a lot iof copies of code from svn repositories because I like to have the bleeding edge of some projects (do you know the new Blender 2.50??? :O) I also have a lot of repositories on JFS and everything works nice. This implies a lot of compile work. This will be the only case where files are created as often as read. For temporary folders while compiling I would recommend to instruct your build scripts to build inside /tmp where you have tmpfs mounted... It's blazingly fast... And some notes about journaled file systems: they journal meta-data (that is file creation, deletion, rename, etc), not data (that is the contents)... (Of course there are a few (Ext3 maybe?) file systems that have the option to also journal data...) What does this mean: well when you edit a file and save it and then cut the power, the file still exists (the meta-data), but the contents could (and usually is) wrong: either no content (like I've encountered once with JFS), either mixed content (old and new)... So the fineprint here is: no journaled file system is safe... They are all safe if you
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 10:47 AM, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Hi, I googled down some - often fairly outdated - texts about the best filesystem fpr a Linux box. Other texts focussed on uses, which do not aplly to me: Fileservers, webservers, database machines etc. Wnat I want is a fast and stable (!) filesystem for a desktop PC with one 1TByte harddisk. Since using Gentoo and a lot of sources I do compile very often bigger things (blender-2.50 for example). Another thing: Due to my experimenting it is possible that I have to reboot hard, which means, the filesystem will be unmounted not cleanly (dirty do to say...;) The choosen filesystem should be good in recovering such thing. I am currently using a vanilla 2.6.32.10 kernel. The question, what remains is: What choose should I make? I thank you very much in advance for any help! Best regards, mcc This doesn't address why you would choose one over another but it was a recent view of Reiser4 vs a couple of others. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=articleitem=reiser4_benchmarksnum=1 I'm way behind. I haven't even tried ext4 yet! Good luck, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
Mick wrote: On Friday 02 April 2010 16:28:43 Dale wrote: Neil Bothwick wrote: On Thu, 1 Apr 2010 21:09:30 +0200, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Then: I often transer videos from my DVB-T-receiver/recorder to my harddisk to cut out the advertising and to transcode the videos to somethings better than ts (transport streams), These tend to be bigger, often in the GB range, so I'd use a separate filesystem for them with XFS, which handles large files better in my experience. He mentioned in one of the first few posts that he regularly has hard shutdowns. I took that as pulling the plug. The last bit of experience I had with XFS, it does not like that sort of thing to happen. Each time I had a hard shutdown, I had to reinstall the OS. Has XFS changed so that power loss is not s problem or should he not use this after all? Would hate for the OP to use XFS if it has not improved in that area. XFS was ropey in its early days. I had to re-install a partition once too (on a laptop!). It is much more stable now (have not had a problem in the last 4+ years). reiserfs is absolutely bullet proof here, with hundreds of crashes on a machine that had bad memory (like twice or three times a day I would have to pull the plug, for months on end until I isolated the error on a memory module). reiser4 seems to be on a class of its own in terms of performance. Perhaps not as forgiving on hard crashes as the reiserfs? Not sure. It's early days yet on this machine, but I have only praises for it so far. I just hope they incorporate it in the kernel so that I don't have to manually patch it every time. This is just my 2c's - so YMMV. I haven't used XFS in several years. I was hoping that it had improved. I just wanted to make sure that it had improved and that it would be safe considering the OP has hard shutdowns. I wouldn't want the OP to use it if he would lose data the first time he had a hard shutdown. That would pretty much suck. I agree on reiserfs tho. I use it a lot here as well. It works very well for me. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, 02 Apr 2010 10:28:43 -0500, Dale wrote: Then: I often transer videos from my DVB-T-receiver/recorder to my harddisk to cut out the advertising and to transcode the videos to somethings better than ts (transport streams), These tend to be bigger, often in the GB range, so I'd use a separate filesystem for them with XFS, which handles large files better in my He mentioned in one of the first few posts that he regularly has hard shutdowns. I took that as pulling the plug. The last bit of experience I had with XFS, it does not like that sort of thing to happen. Each time I had a hard shutdown, I had to reinstall the OS. Has XFS changed so that power loss is not s problem or should he not use this after all? If the system crashes so hard that even Magic SysRq can't help, he should be fixing that first, rather than trying to find a filesystem that likes such shutdowns. Having said that XFS is much better now and I was recommending using it for video files, which are hardly life and death. -- Neil Bothwick I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter. - Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965) signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 14:45:29 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: seriously lvm sounds nice. But it isn't. It easily breaks. Do you have something to back that up? You want a save setup? Go raid5 or raid6. As a bonus - you can get more space if you need it by just adding another disk. And you are not depending on some complex stuff to get it working. LVM and RAID are completely different animals. No one suggested using it for any reasons of data security, running LVM on a RAID array gives both security and flexibility. As for being able to add space to RAID, you can't temporarily add a new volume whenever you want, you have to go out and buy another drive, then power down the computer to fit it, assuming there is room in the case for an extra drive. Remember this thread started with a question about a single large disk. -- Neil Bothwick Sacred cows make great hamburgers. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Freitag 02 April 2010, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 14:45:29 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: seriously lvm sounds nice. But it isn't. It easily breaks. Do you have something to back that up? You want a save setup? Go raid5 or raid6. As a bonus - you can get more space if you need it by just adding another disk. And you are not depending on some complex stuff to get it working. LVM and RAID are completely different animals. No one suggested using it for any reasons of data security, running LVM on a RAID array gives both security and flexibility. As for being able to add space to RAID, you can't temporarily add a new volume whenever you want, you have to go out and buy another drive, then power down the computer to fit it, assuming there is room in the case for an extra drive. no need to power down - and you can add and remove drives. Read man mdadm.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 20:40:54 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: LVM and RAID are completely different animals. No one suggested using it for any reasons of data security, running LVM on a RAID array gives both security and flexibility. As for being able to add space to RAID, you can't temporarily add a new volume whenever you want, you have to go out and buy another drive, then power down the computer to fit it, assuming there is room in the case for an extra drive. no need to power down - and you can add and remove drives. Read man mdadm. Assuming your controller supports hotplugging, assuming you have a drive available to plug in, assuming you are able to physically add a drive. -- Neil Bothwick Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on the earth. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Freitag 02 April 2010, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 20:40:54 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: LVM and RAID are completely different animals. No one suggested using it for any reasons of data security, running LVM on a RAID array gives both security and flexibility. As for being able to add space to RAID, you can't temporarily add a new volume whenever you want, you have to go out and buy another drive, then power down the computer to fit it, assuming there is room in the case for an extra drive. no need to power down - and you can add and remove drives. Read man mdadm. Assuming your controller supports hotplugging, assuming you have a drive available to plug in, assuming you are able to physically add a drive. sata can hotplug. all ahci controlers can hotplug and all sata drives can hotplug. If you insist on technology straight from the stone ages that is your problem.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 21:50:09 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: Assuming your controller supports hotplugging, assuming you have a drive available to plug in, assuming you are able to physically add a drive. sata can hotplug. all ahci controlers can hotplug and all sata drives can hotplug. If you insist on technology straight from the stone ages that is your problem. I'd like to see you hotplug another SATA drive into this netbook, whereas I can add another volume in seconds. -- Neil Bothwick Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today. signature.asc Description: PGP signature
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann volkerar...@googlemail.com wrote: On Freitag 02 April 2010, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 20:40:54 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: LVM and RAID are completely different animals. No one suggested using it for any reasons of data security, running LVM on a RAID array gives both security and flexibility. As for being able to add space to RAID, you can't temporarily add a new volume whenever you want, you have to go out and buy another drive, then power down the computer to fit it, assuming there is room in the case for an extra drive. no need to power down - and you can add and remove drives. Read man mdadm. Assuming your controller supports hotplugging, assuming you have a drive available to plug in, assuming you are able to physically add a drive. sata can hotplug. all ahci controlers can hotplug and all sata drives can hotplug. If you insist on technology straight from the stone ages that is your problem. Do you know if it's necessary to signal to the system (like /proc/scsi something) that I'm about to unplug the drive, and in which order the power/data need to be disconnected to prevent a problem? I'm curious in case of future need. :) Thanks.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 2:49 PM, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann volkerar...@googlemail.com wrote: On Freitag 02 April 2010, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 20:40:54 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: LVM and RAID are completely different animals. No one suggested using it for any reasons of data security, running LVM on a RAID array gives both security and flexibility. As for being able to add space to RAID, you can't temporarily add a new volume whenever you want, you have to go out and buy another drive, then power down the computer to fit it, assuming there is room in the case for an extra drive. no need to power down - and you can add and remove drives. Read man mdadm. Assuming your controller supports hotplugging, assuming you have a drive available to plug in, assuming you are able to physically add a drive. sata can hotplug. all ahci controlers can hotplug and all sata drives can hotplug. If you insist on technology straight from the stone ages that is your problem. Do you know if it's necessary to signal to the system (like /proc/scsi something) that I'm about to unplug the drive, and in which order the power/data need to be disconnected to prevent a problem? I'm curious in case of future need. :) Thanks. If it's part of a RAID the new one gets rebuilt. If it's not part of a RAID then I think, as per Neil's example, the computer is pretty much dead, right? However if you wanted to try it (and I'm not brave enough so don't listen to me) then you might want to do something like grep -A 1 dirty /proc/vmstat and wait until nothing is dirty. Just an idea, Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 1:47 PM, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Hi, I googled down some - often fairly outdated - texts about the best filesystem fpr a Linux box. Other texts focussed on uses, which do not aplly to me: Fileservers, webservers, database machines etc. Wnat I want is a fast and stable (!) filesystem for a desktop PC with one 1TByte harddisk. Since using Gentoo and a lot of sources I do compile very often bigger things (blender-2.50 for example). Another thing: Due to my experimenting it is possible that I have to reboot hard, which means, the filesystem will be unmounted not cleanly (dirty do to say...;) The choosen filesystem should be good in recovering such thing. I am currently using a vanilla 2.6.32.10 kernel. The question, what remains is: What choose should I make? I have been following this thread. I decided to research to do my own comparisons of ext3, ext4, JFS and XFS. ext3 has 3 journaling levels: Journal (lowest risk) Ordered (medium risk) most Linux distributions are using this one Writeback (highest risk) XFS uses Ordered (medium risk) JFS uses Writeback (highest risk) It appears from the documentation that ext4 takes the best of ext3, XFS and JFS. My research also showed that ext2/3 is the most widely used on Linux and has the greatest community support coverage. ext4 falls into the same category as XFS and JFS in this respect. It appears that ext4, XFS or JFS or some combination of them would be the best choice. If you want to know where I got my information use Google like I did. -- If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy. - Thomas Jefferson
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 4:55 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 2:49 PM, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann volkerar...@googlemail.com wrote: On Freitag 02 April 2010, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 20:40:54 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: LVM and RAID are completely different animals. No one suggested using it for any reasons of data security, running LVM on a RAID array gives both security and flexibility. As for being able to add space to RAID, you can't temporarily add a new volume whenever you want, you have to go out and buy another drive, then power down the computer to fit it, assuming there is room in the case for an extra drive. no need to power down - and you can add and remove drives. Read man mdadm. Assuming your controller supports hotplugging, assuming you have a drive available to plug in, assuming you are able to physically add a drive. sata can hotplug. all ahci controlers can hotplug and all sata drives can hotplug. If you insist on technology straight from the stone ages that is your problem. Do you know if it's necessary to signal to the system (like /proc/scsi something) that I'm about to unplug the drive, and in which order the power/data need to be disconnected to prevent a problem? I'm curious in case of future need. :) Thanks. If it's part of a RAID the new one gets rebuilt. If it's not part of a RAID then I think, as per Neil's example, the computer is pretty much dead, right? However if you wanted to try it (and I'm not brave enough so don't listen to me) then you might want to do something like grep -A 1 dirty /proc/vmstat and wait until nothing is dirty. Just an idea, Well, forgetting about RAID and bad drives, I should be able to unmount a normal, working SATA drive and unplug it safely, just like with a USB hard drive. I just don't know if you have to signal to SATA/AHCI that you're going to unplug (like with old hot-swappable SCSI drives), or if you need to unplug data cable before unplugging the power cable, for example.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 4:55 PM, Mark Knecht markkne...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 2:49 PM, Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Volker Armin Hemmann volkerar...@googlemail.com wrote: On Freitag 02 April 2010, Neil Bothwick wrote: On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 20:40:54 +0200, Volker Armin Hemmann wrote: LVM and RAID are completely different animals. No one suggested using it for any reasons of data security, running LVM on a RAID array gives both security and flexibility. As for being able to add space to RAID, you can't temporarily add a new volume whenever you want, you have to go out and buy another drive, then power down the computer to fit it, assuming there is room in the case for an extra drive. no need to power down - and you can add and remove drives. Read man mdadm. Assuming your controller supports hotplugging, assuming you have a drive available to plug in, assuming you are able to physically add a drive. sata can hotplug. all ahci controlers can hotplug and all sata drives can hotplug. If you insist on technology straight from the stone ages that is your problem. Do you know if it's necessary to signal to the system (like /proc/scsi something) that I'm about to unplug the drive, and in which order the power/data need to be disconnected to prevent a problem? I'm curious in case of future need. :) Thanks. If it's part of a RAID the new one gets rebuilt. If it's not part of a RAID then I think, as per Neil's example, the computer is pretty much dead, right? However if you wanted to try it (and I'm not brave enough so don't listen to me) then you might want to do something like grep -A 1 dirty /proc/vmstat and wait until nothing is dirty. Just an idea, Well, forgetting about RAID and bad drives, I should be able to unmount a normal, working SATA drive and unplug it safely, just like with a USB hard drive. I just don't know if you have to signal to SATA/AHCI that you're going to unplug (like with old hot-swappable SCSI drives), or if you need to unplug data cable before unplugging the power cable, for example. I've never done it but according to the SATA spec yes. As with all drive umount first. Nothing I've read says it's truly safe to do it too many times. It's easy to damage or wear out the connectors or the drive. It's the #1 'end-user benefit' according to the SATA spec web pages: http://www.serialata.org/technology/why_sata.asp - Mark
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
stosss sto...@gmail.com [10-04-03 05:31]: On Thu, Apr 1, 2010 at 1:47 PM, meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Hi, I googled down some - often fairly outdated - texts about the best filesystem fpr a Linux box. Other texts focussed on uses, which do not aplly to me: Fileservers, webservers, database machines etc. Wnat I want is a fast and stable (!) filesystem for a desktop PC with one 1TByte harddisk. Since using Gentoo and a lot of sources I do compile very often bigger things (blender-2.50 for example). Another thing: Due to my experimenting it is possible that I have to reboot hard, which means, the filesystem will be unmounted not cleanly (dirty do to say...;) The choosen filesystem should be good in recovering such thing. I am currently using a vanilla 2.6.32.10 kernel. The question, what remains is: What choose should I make? I have been following this thread. I decided to research to do my own comparisons of ext3, ext4, JFS and XFS. ext3 has 3 journaling levels: Journal (lowest risk) Ordered (medium risk) most Linux distributions are using this one Writeback (highest risk) XFS uses Ordered (medium risk) JFS uses Writeback (highest risk) It appears from the documentation that ext4 takes the best of ext3, XFS and JFS. My research also showed that ext2/3 is the most widely used on Linux and has the greatest community support coverage. ext4 falls into the same category as XFS and JFS in this respect. It appears that ext4, XFS or JFS or some combination of them would be the best choice. If you want to know where I got my information use Google like I did. -- If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy. - Thomas Jefferson Hi Stoss, thanks for your effort ! :) As I wrote, I did googling before starting this thread and found mostly outdated informations or informations not applying to my situation. Often it is best -- regardless what papers of 2008 or before are stateing -- to ask people for their current and uptodate experiences. Additionally your informations are all pure technical based...they are missing exactly what I was searching for: Experiences of people using different setups. And as you can see: This thread reports many of that. Best reagrds. mcc -- Please don't send me any Word- or Powerpoint-Attachments unless it's absolutely neccessary. - Send simply Text. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html In a world without fences and walls nobody needs gates and windows.
[gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
Hi, I googled down some - often fairly outdated - texts about the best filesystem fpr a Linux box. Other texts focussed on uses, which do not aplly to me: Fileservers, webservers, database machines etc. Wnat I want is a fast and stable (!) filesystem for a desktop PC with one 1TByte harddisk. Since using Gentoo and a lot of sources I do compile very often bigger things (blender-2.50 for example). Another thing: Due to my experimenting it is possible that I have to reboot hard, which means, the filesystem will be unmounted not cleanly (dirty do to say...;) The choosen filesystem should be good in recovering such thing. I am currently using a vanilla 2.6.32.10 kernel. The question, what remains is: What choose should I make? I thank you very much in advance for any help! Best regards, mcc -- Please don't send me any Word- or Powerpoint-Attachments unless it's absolutely neccessary. - Send simply Text. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html In a world without fences and walls nobody needs gates and windows.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
I have been using reiserfs ( 3, not 4 ) for several years and have found it to recover without any problems from dirty shutdowns, at most I've had to use reiserfstools to fix the filesystem. I had no such luck with ext3, although as a journalled filesystem in theory it should do the same. I have never tried other journalled filesystems, so I can't give you my opinion. HTH -- Michele
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
Its kind of tricky question :) and if You look closely You could find som flames about it :P Iam using ReiserFS for my root and xfs for the rest and testing btrfs. I never gets any problem with broken partition table etc. (and i experienced several quick power downs). But reiserfs have some problems with bkl etc and i am not sure if its still main line active because of developing raiser4. In some reviews You can find that its eats more cpu time too. btrfs could be very nice but its not stable yet (or maybe not for real use :P) Maybe someone could share experience about ext4 - iam using it on my g1 but its hard to say anything ... -- Pozdrawiam, Bartosz Szatkowski You must exorcise any evil proprietary operating systems that possess any of the computers under your control, and then install a wholly/holy free operating system, and then only install Free Software on top of that.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Hi, I googled down some - often fairly outdated - texts about the best filesystem fpr a Linux box. Other texts focussed on uses, which do not aplly to me: Fileservers, webservers, database machines etc. Wnat I want is a fast and stable (!) filesystem for a desktop PC with one 1TByte harddisk. Since using Gentoo and a lot of sources I do compile very often bigger things (blender-2.50 for example). Another thing: Due to my experimenting it is possible that I have to reboot hard, which means, the filesystem will be unmounted not cleanly (dirty do to say...;) The choosen filesystem should be good in recovering such thing. I am currently using a vanilla 2.6.32.10 kernel. The question, what remains is: What choose should I make? I thank you very much in advance for any help! Best regards, mcc I notice you have a fairly large drive. You may want to indicate whether or not you will be putting large files on it or what not. If you are, some files systems work better with large files. That said, if you plan to have a lot of small files, then another file system may work better. If you plan to have a mix, then it could get interesting. ;-) I use reiserfs myself and have had no problems, even with a hard shutdown or some other failure. Thing is, most file systems are good but it depends on what you will be putting on it. From my experience, don't use XFS unless you have a UPS and will not be having to pull the plug. I tried XFS a while back and each time there was a hard shutdown, I had to reinstall. It was running Mandriva so I didn't know how to recover with it and no other bootable CD either. XFS has its good points but surviving a power plug pull is not one of them. I will also say this, it is a good idea to ask first on this. There are a lot of good file systems out there and each one has its strong points. It's best to get the right one first rather than to have to redo things later on. Dale :-) :-)
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
Dale rdalek1...@gmail.com [10-04-01 20:36]: meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Hi, I googled down some - often fairly outdated - texts about the best filesystem fpr a Linux box. Other texts focussed on uses, which do not aplly to me: Fileservers, webservers, database machines etc. Wnat I want is a fast and stable (!) filesystem for a desktop PC with one 1TByte harddisk. Since using Gentoo and a lot of sources I do compile very often bigger things (blender-2.50 for example). Another thing: Due to my experimenting it is possible that I have to reboot hard, which means, the filesystem will be unmounted not cleanly (dirty do to say...;) The choosen filesystem should be good in recovering such thing. I am currently using a vanilla 2.6.32.10 kernel. The question, what remains is: What choose should I make? I thank you very much in advance for any help! Best regards, mcc I notice you have a fairly large drive. You may want to indicate whether or not you will be putting large files on it or what not. If you are, some files systems work better with large files. That said, if you plan to have a lot of small files, then another file system may work better. If you plan to have a mix, then it could get interesting. ;-) I use reiserfs myself and have had no problems, even with a hard shutdown or some other failure. Thing is, most file systems are good but it depends on what you will be putting on it. From my experience, don't use XFS unless you have a UPS and will not be having to pull the plug. I tried XFS a while back and each time there was a hard shutdown, I had to reinstall. It was running Mandriva so I didn't know how to recover with it and no other bootable CD either. XFS has its good points but surviving a power plug pull is not one of them. I will also say this, it is a good idea to ask first on this. There are a lot of good file systems out there and each one has its strong points. It's best to get the right one first rather than to have to redo things later on. Dale :-) :-) Hi, thanks for all the input to all who have answered ! :) I will try to characterize (characterise ?) what I plan to do with my TByte disk. My current drive is 200GByte and it becomes too small... I DONT LIKE (read: hate) to put CDs or DVDs into my drive, to mount it only to get access to documentations. CDs and DVDs as storage media in the sense of backup is ok, but (at least for me) as a replacement or extension to the harddisk it is much to slow (at least for me). So I have a lot of docs (specs of microcontrollers, howtos, programm and source code docs...etc) on my disk. This one part. Then: I often transer videos from my DVB-T-receiver/recorder to my harddisk to cut out the advertising and to transcode the videos to somethings better than ts (transport streams), This is another part. Then I plan to have two roots this time: One to experiment with and one good and stable-version which is used/updated/... strictly as recommended. Filesizes and usage do vary here...take a look at your own roots ;))) Then I want something encrypted, either as a partition or as a files (carrying a encrypted fs), which I can copy to dvd and will be able to mount this dvd and use it without to have to copy the whole dvd first to harddisk before using it... Currently I am using encfs...(outdated?). What can I do use instead? This is for personal things like letters, photos, texts ... etc. Files vary from some kb up to about 2GByte (guessed). Most of them smaller than 200MByte Last thing: I have a lot iof copies of code from svn repositories because I like to have the bleeding edge of some projects (do you know the new Blender 2.50??? :O) This implies a lot of compile work. This will be the only case where files are created as often as read. Most files will be far more read than written... I have not planned a webserver, fileserve, extensive database usage (ok emerge and helpers a little of database usage...), experimental file creation and deletion...etcpp I would say...maximium file size will be around 4GB for all of that above, since everything above that I cannot backup onto DVDRWs May be this will give you a little look inside my harddisk ;) Any recommendations? keep hacking! ;) mcc -- Please don't send me any Word- or Powerpoint-Attachments unless it's absolutely neccessary. - Send simply Text. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html In a world without fences and walls nobody needs gates and windows.
Re: [gentoo-user] OT:Choosing a filesystem
meino.cra...@gmx.de wrote: Hi, thanks for all the input to all who have answered ! :) I will try to characterize (characterise ?) what I plan to do with my TByte disk. My current drive is 200GByte and it becomes too small... I DONT LIKE (read: hate) to put CDs or DVDs into my drive, to mount it only to get access to documentations. CDs and DVDs as storage media in the sense of backup is ok, but (at least for me) as a replacement or extension to the harddisk it is much to slow (at least for me). So I have a lot of docs (specs of microcontrollers, howtos, programm and source code docs...etc) on my disk. This one part. Then: I often transer videos from my DVB-T-receiver/recorder to my harddisk to cut out the advertising and to transcode the videos to somethings better than ts (transport streams), This is another part. Then I plan to have two roots this time: One to experiment with and one good and stable-version which is used/updated/... strictly as recommended. Filesizes and usage do vary here...take a look at your own roots ;))) Then I want something encrypted, either as a partition or as a files (carrying a encrypted fs), which I can copy to dvd and will be able to mount this dvd and use it without to have to copy the whole dvd first to harddisk before using it... Currently I am using encfs...(outdated?). What can I do use instead? This is for personal things like letters, photos, texts ... etc. Files vary from some kb up to about 2GByte (guessed). Most of them smaller than 200MByte Last thing: I have a lot iof copies of code from svn repositories because I like to have the bleeding edge of some projects (do you know the new Blender 2.50??? :O) This implies a lot of compile work. This will be the only case where files are created as often as read. Most files will be far more read than written... I have not planned a webserver, fileserve, extensive database usage (ok emerge and helpers a little of database usage...), experimental file creation and deletion...etcpp I would say...maximium file size will be around 4GB for all of that above, since everything above that I cannot backup onto DVDRWs May be this will give you a little look inside my harddisk ;) Any recommendations? keep hacking! ;) mcc I'm no file system guru but that will help inform people on what you will be using it for. The people on this list that do use all sorts of different file systems can now offer better advice on what might best suite you. Someone a good while back had a huge video or something that was causing trouble and if I recall correctly it was because of some file system limitation or something to that effect. Give the thread a day or so so that others can chime in with advice. Some people are in different time zones, some answer at home, some at work etc etc so it takes a bit to let the gurus catch up. Dale :-) :-)
