>>>> I wouldn't use XFS unless >>>> it was all that was left. I tried it once a while back and found out it >>>> does not like power failures at all. Each time I had a power failure, I >>>> had to reinstall from scratch. >>> Hmm, I use it because of its resistance to power failures. When was it that >>> you had such problems? >> Its been a while but it happened several times. I just got tired of >> having to reinstall every time the power blinked. Turned out the wire >> was loose on the transformer so they blinked a lot, every couple days or >> so. I think it was Mandrake 9.2. >> >> I have had a power failure or two with reiserfs and it recovered. It >> did the check thing but ran fine. >> >> Just my experience. Your mileage may vary. > I have a similar story, but for me it was JFS instead of XFS. I will > never, ever, ever use JFS for anything again. I had XFS on a file > server RAID box with a failing power supply and it died over and over > and the FS stayed functional, so YMMV indeed. (I haven't tried reiser, > I'm still scared about the corruption stories from years ago.) > > I suppose if you ask enough people, there will be horror stories about > every filesystem. I use reiserfs and I twice got serious filesystem corruptions after crashes, and one was very serious. It is unclear whether this was reiserfs's fault or the hardware. You see, I was using athcool to save electricity, and it seems that when the bit "Disconnect enable when STPGNT detected" is set on the Northbridge (this is what athcool does) and you are using a PixelView PV-M4900 FM.RC (specially if you are recording tv - with mencoder - as opposed to just viewing it - with mplayer), your computer malfunctions. I was able to recover much of the data with reiserfsck --rebuild-tree, but some of the files had part of their content replaced with a string of null bytes. I heard somewhere that reiserfs is infamous for replacing file content with a string of null bytes, so maybe this is indeed reiserfs fault, and not just bad hardware.
By the way, I chose reiserfs (some 3 years ago I believe) because of its speed fame, but now, thinking of it, there are only four computer activities that make my system slow: 1) launch heavy programs such as firefox (when not in cache) 2) compile software 3) view certain web pages in firefox 4) encode video Now, since I usually compile software in a tmpfs, I guess the filesystem makes nearly zero difference. Video encoding is obviously bound by CPU, cache and RAM speed, not filesystem. Web rendering is also hardly affected by filesystem . And launching programs means mostly reading files, and would reiserfs be significantly faster than ext3 for this, specially considering that my system is minimalist and the root partition is only 7% used? So it seems I should not have chosen reiserfs, which has a fame of being less safe than ext3, and certainly has less software support than ext3. The next time I format my root partition, I will choose ext3 (then move to ext4 when it is stable). -- Software is like sex: it is better when it is free - Linus Torvalds
