Re: [gentoo-user] {OT?} which fs on 1.8TB partition

[Rich Freeman]

On Fri, Oct 6, 2017 at 5:53 AM, Philip Webb <purslow@××××××××.net> wrote:
> 171005 christos kotsis wrote:
>> I just noticed that ReiserFS has significant performance
>> over ext3, 4 when dealing with small files.
>
> I've long relied on ReiserFS for everything except  /boot
> & have never had any problems with my files or drives.
> I have many small files + a few big PDFs -- perhaps  c 20 MB ea  --
> & the big ones simply stay where I put them, so no changes to handle.
>

Unless your needs are fairly specialized (in which case you probably
wouldn't be looking for advice on this list), I'd probably stick with
the more mainstream filesystems.

I doubt reiserfs will eat your data, but it has been generally falling
out of use.

IMO if your goal isn't to experiment with alternate filesystems, there
are really only a couple of mainstream choices out there for a
general-purpose workstation filesystem:

1.  Ext4:  This should just be your default if you don't want to care
about your filesystem.  It is ubiquitous for a reason.  It won't eat
your data, and everybody knows what to expect from it.  If your
filesystem is fairly small and being used for a root, or otherwise has
a lot of small files, then make sure to override the inode defaults.
Other than that it just works.

2.  Xfs: If you absolutely have to mess with a filesystem (especially
for multimedia) this isn't a bad alternative.  You won't be able to
shrink it, but for the most part it behaves a lot like ext4.

Zfs is starting to cross over into experimental territory, IMO, though
it generally is fairly stable.  I care about data integrity, so it is
what I tend to run (well, aside from one btrfs filesystem I haven't
switched over).  I had a SATA port misbehave and spread silent
corruption all over a disk, and zfs got me through it without anything
but some warning alerts/etc and a need to rebuild after I moved the
drive to another controller (and marked a big X over the port).  If I
were using mdadm I'd have had to rebuild from backups at a cost of
hours of downtime (a fairly large array), and might have lost
recently-written data entirely as might have been in use for longer
before detecting the error, leaving me a dilemma of figuring out which
backup versions were good, with the answer being something older.
Even if I didn't have redundancy zfs (or btrfs) would have complained
loudly about the issue.  I do use snapshots because they're cheap, but
rolling back is pretty rare.

Unless you have a very specialized need I wouldn't go messing with
block sizes or anything like that in any of these cases.

-- 
Rich