[Techtalk] filesystem options

[Peter Samuelson]

[Kristina Clair]
> Does anyone have any strong opinions for pros and cons of various
> filesystems?  Particularly, for a hardware raid 5 1TB device which
> will be used over nfs by high-traffic webservers.

I've not got much constructive to say (xfs is probably best for the
job, but I don't have much personal experience with it), but I did want
to say that reiserfs is only good if you keep good backups.  When it
works it works well, but eventually something will go wrong and you'll
be left having to run reiserfsck, which is not an enviable fate.

For years, the reiserfs fans have been saying "oh yes, it used to have
stability problems, but that's all in the past now" and for those same
years, I keep hearing anecdotes of filesystems getting ruined one way
or another.  I myself was fairly lucky with reiserfs - I ran it for
awhile somewhere and the worst that happened was that it crashed my
kernel - I promptly replaced it with ext3 and never did lose data.

Maybe all the reiserfs problems really are fixed now, but, y'know,
that's what they said in 2001.

Peter