[NBLUG/talk] hard drive death, filesystem types

[Troy Arnold]

On Thu, Dec 16, 2004 at 06:55:29PM -0800, Bob Blick wrote:
> I had a very depressing hard drive failure today. I learned two 
> things today:
> 
> 1. Maxtor drives really are junk, just like everyone says.
> 2. reiserfs is bad. There seem to be no tools to rescue anything off 
> this drive.

I strongly disagree with both of those statements.
1. Hard drive choice tends to be one of those holy-war things, but I've
   had lots of experience with Maxtor drives because A) they're usually
   priced well, and B) I keep buying them because of A and because I
   haven't had one fail yet, either my own or those purchased for
   others. On the other hand I've had a couple of IBM's fail and more
   Western Digitals than I can keep track of.  But I know other people
   that that really like the WD drives, so go figure.  One more thing on
   this topic: 
   <http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/>
   <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6983>

2. You're probably just pissed 'cause your drive crashed, so I won't
   pick on you too hard for this... But the lack of installed reiserfs
   tools, certainly does not mean that they don't exist.
   
> Any comments about filesystems?

Depends on the application.  UPS or not, I'd still stick with a
journaling filesystem.  90min fsck's are no fun!  All of the big three
(ext3, reiserfs, xfs) are tunable to some extent, and all are reliable
and perform well enough that you don't need to worry much about the
choice unless you're going to be tuning it for a specific purpose.  xfs
can be made to perform really well for very large files, for instance.

> Any help for rescuing my reiserfs disk?

Lincoln already pointed you to reiserfsck.  If can't/don't wish to
install that tool, it's on a Knoppix CD.  And hey, look at that, Kyle
covers this topic in Knoppix Hacks, hack #57.

-troy