[NBLUG/talk] Recommendations for journalling filesystems?

[Jippen]

[copied from the gentoo handbook]

Filesystems?

The Linux kernel supports various filesystems. We'll explain ext2,
ext3, ReiserFS, XFS and JFS as these are the most commonly used
filesystems on Linux systems.

ext2 is the tried and true Linux filesystem but doesn't have metadata
journaling, which means that routine ext2 filesystem checks at startup
time can be quite time-consuming. There is now quite a selection of
newer-generation journaled filesystems that can be checked for
consistency very quickly and are thus generally preferred over their
non-journaled counterparts. Journaled filesystems prevent long delays
when you boot your system and your filesystem happens to be in an
inconsistent state.

ext3 is the journaled version of the ext2 filesystem, providing
metadata journaling for fast recovery in addition to other enhanced
journaling modes like full data and ordered data journaling. ext3 is a
very good and reliable filesystem. It has an additional hashed b-tree
indexing option that enables high performance in almost all
situations. You can enable this indexing by adding -O dir_index to the
mke2fs command. In short, ext3 is an excellent filesystem.

ReiserFS is a B*-tree based filesystem that has very good overall
performance and greatly outperforms both ext2 and ext3 when dealing
with small files (files less than 4k), often by a factor of 10x-15x.
ReiserFS also scales extremely well and has metadata journaling. As of
kernel 2.4.18+, ReiserFS is solid and usable as both general-purpose
filesystem and for extreme cases such as the creation of large
filesystems, the use of many small files, very large files and
directories containing tens of thousands of files.

XFS is a filesystem with metadata journaling which comes with a robust
feature-set and is optimized for scalability. We only recommend using
this filesystem on Linux systems with high-end SCSI and/or fibre
channel storage and an uninterruptible power supply. Because XFS
aggressively caches in-transit data in RAM, improperly designed
programs (those that don't take proper precautions when writing files
to disk and there are quite a few of them) can lose a good deal of
data if the system goes down unexpectedly.

JFS is IBM's high-performance journaling filesystem. It has recently
become production-ready and there hasn't been a sufficient track
record to comment positively nor negatively on its general stability
at this point.
[end copying]

Honestly, if you have the equipment to be pulling XFS on a system like
gentoo recommends, it seems like the best choice. Otherwise, it'd
prolly be best to go with ext3. Or, if you feel brave, NTFS. ~ducks
and runs~