On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 5:53 AM, Philip Webb <purs...@ca.inter.net> wrote: > 171005 christos kotsis wrote: >> I just noticed that ReiserFS has significant performance >> over ext3, 4 when dealing with small files. > > I've long relied on ReiserFS for everything except /boot > & have never had any problems with my files or drives. > I have many small files + a few big PDFs -- perhaps c 20 MB ea -- > & the big ones simply stay where I put them, so no changes to handle. >
Unless your needs are fairly specialized (in which case you probably wouldn't be looking for advice on this list), I'd probably stick with the more mainstream filesystems. I doubt reiserfs will eat your data, but it has been generally falling out of use. IMO if your goal isn't to experiment with alternate filesystems, there are really only a couple of mainstream choices out there for a general-purpose workstation filesystem: 1. Ext4: This should just be your default if you don't want to care about your filesystem. It is ubiquitous for a reason. It won't eat your data, and everybody knows what to expect from it. If your filesystem is fairly small and being used for a root, or otherwise has a lot of small files, then make sure to override the inode defaults. Other than that it just works. 2. Xfs: If you absolutely have to mess with a filesystem (especially for multimedia) this isn't a bad alternative. You won't be able to shrink it, but for the most part it behaves a lot like ext4. Zfs is starting to cross over into experimental territory, IMO, though it generally is fairly stable. I care about data integrity, so it is what I tend to run (well, aside from one btrfs filesystem I haven't switched over). I had a SATA port misbehave and spread silent corruption all over a disk, and zfs got me through it without anything but some warning alerts/etc and a need to rebuild after I moved the drive to another controller (and marked a big X over the port). If I were using mdadm I'd have had to rebuild from backups at a cost of hours of downtime (a fairly large array), and might have lost recently-written data entirely as might have been in use for longer before detecting the error, leaving me a dilemma of figuring out which backup versions were good, with the answer being something older. Even if I didn't have redundancy zfs (or btrfs) would have complained loudly about the issue. I do use snapshots because they're cheap, but rolling back is pretty rare. Unless you have a very specialized need I wouldn't go messing with block sizes or anything like that in any of these cases. -- Rich
