On Apr 13 Kurt Fitzner wrote:
>I have a raid5 array on my web server for which I am currently
>considering a move to ext3. I want to use an external journal to
>improve performance.
>
>Since the external journal would reside on a drive that is not
>participating in the raid array, I'm wondering what the behavior of an
>ext3 filesystem is should the device an external journal is on should
>fail. If it reverts to ext2 behavior upon failure, then I can justify
>using a non-raid device for an external journal.
There could be metadata which is only in the journal, so failure probably
means reboot + full fsck, so you may as well use ext2 if your machine
doesn't otherwise crash.
Far preferable, I think, would be to put your journal on a RAID 1 pair.