CentOS - Mar 2010 - Looking for experiences with filesystem choices....

Lots of opinions out there and I have read and read, so I have a home server
that I have finally setup with a hot swap hdd cage and what I am planning on
doing is copying my data drive every other day and rotating them offsite,
haven't figured out how often though.  So I did my first test last night and
the backup drive was formatted with ext3 but looking to try to speed things
up and was wondering what would be my best choice.  Most of my data is on
VM's and the hdd files on some of them are quite large, I have used JFS and
reiser in the past and was leaning on going with JFS but am tempted to look
at XFS.  So what I was wondering are what are folks experiences (instead of
opinions) with different filesystems and while I want speed it needs to be
reliable since it will be my back up data....running centos 5.4 x64


Thanks in advance...
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On 03/21/2010 04:01 PM, Tom Bishop wrote:
> Lots of opinions out there and I have read and read, so I have a home
> server that I have finally setup with a hot swap hdd cage and what I am
> planning on doing is copying my data drive every other day and rotating
> them offsite, haven't figured out how often though.  So I did my first
> test last night and the backup drive was formatted with ext3 but looking
> to try to speed things up and was wondering what would be my best
> choice.  Most of my data is on VM's and the hdd files on some of them
> are quite large, I have used JFS and reiser in the past and was leaning
> on going with JFS but am tempted to look at XFS.  So what I was
> wondering are what are folks experiences (instead of opinions) with
> different filesystems and while I want speed it needs to be reliable
> since it will be my back up data....running centos 5.4 x64
>
>
> Thanks in advance...
Hi,

in December last year there was a nice thread about choosing the 'right'
FS for certain circumstances, which included JFS, XFS, ext3/4 etc.

http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/2009-December/086842.html

HTH,

Timo

Tom Bishop wrote:
> Lots of opinions out there and I have read and read, so I have a home
server
> that I have finally setup with a hot swap hdd cage and what I am planning
on
> doing is copying my data drive every other day and rotating them offsite,
> haven't figured out how often though.  So I did my first test last
night and
> the backup drive was formatted with ext3 but looking to try to speed things
> up and was wondering what would be my best choice.  Most of my data is on
> VM's and the hdd files on some of them are quite large, I have used JFS
and
> reiser in the past and was leaning on going with JFS but am tempted to look
> at XFS.  So what I was wondering are what are folks experiences (instead of
> opinions) with different filesystems and while I want speed it needs to be
> reliable since it will be my back up data....running centos 5.4 x64
> 
> 
> Thanks in advance...
> 
Not the question you asked, but I'm guessing the choice of backup method 
for "copying" the data will have far more effect than the choice of 
filesystem. How are you backing up the data? Presumably something like 
rsync will speed up matters considerably over a straight copy once the 
first pass is done.

So I tried XFS last night and it cut my copy times down substantially, so I
need someone to verify that XFS in centos 5.4 has barriers enabled by
default, I am not using LVM just the old fashion partitions and mount
points.  It appears that reading from the centos wiki that xfs is enabled in
the kernel due to upstream vendor doing so for the first timeI loaded up
xfsprogs and xfsdump but it was not clear about the barrier details....


Thanks...in advance. :)

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Brent L. Bates <blbates at vigyan.com>
wrote:
>     If you want dependability, reliability, robustness, and a fast file
> system the only choice is XFS.  It is the ONLY file system I will
> use/trust.
>  I've been using it since it first came out on SGI's under IRIX and
have
> been
> using it under Linux for a number of years.  It survives system crashes and
> disk hardware problems and just keeps on going.  You will not find a better
> file system out there.
>
> --
>
>  Brent L. Bates (UNIX Sys. Admin.)
>  M.S. 912                              Phone:(757) 865-1400, x204
>  NASA Langley Research Center            FAX:(757) 865-8177
>  Hampton, Virginia  23681-0001
>  Email: B.L.BATES at larc.nasa.gov       
http://www.vigyan.com/~blbates/<http://www.vigyan.com/%7Eblbates/>
>
>
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