[NBLUG/talk] Recommendations for journalling filesystems?

[Bob Blick]

> However, EXT3 works poorly for MythTV.  It turns out that EXT3 is pretty
> poor at deleting very large files.  For test purposes, I tried to delete
> a 20GB file, and EXT3 would generate very heavy disk activity for around
> 20 seconds or so.  The the 'rm' command would come back.  Since MythTV
> can routinely generate large files (video is ~ 2GB/hour, assuming no HD
> - HD is bigger), EXT3 is a poor choice for MythTV.  When I redid this
> test on a JFS file system, the identical delete operation would be about
> 0.1 seconds.
>
> For MythTV, I've been running JFS on the video partition, and it's
> worked well for me.  This is the recommended file system of choice since
> XFS has some stability issues when used with LVM (so says Jarod's MythTV
> guide, anyway).

I wonder if it's necessary to use a journalled filesystem for a video
partition. There are very few files and they are just TV, right? I'm
currently putting together a MythTV box, and I'm using ext2 for the video
partition. If it craps out and I lose a couple of TV shows it won't be a
big loss. And hard disks are pretty accurate now(except when they aren't!)
- I've been using ext2 on my car computer since 1999, don't run fsck
except manually when I do maintenance, and have not had a single problem.

Cheerful regards,

Bob