Choice of Linux filesystem (Re: [Techtalk] Linux on NTFS?)

[Val Henson]

On 1/11/06, Mary <mary-linuxchix at puzzling.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 11, 2006, Mike wrote:
> > I suggest Reiserfs. I feel it is superior to ext3. I have my lappy using
> > ext3 and it has to check itself every 21 starts or so and it is annoying and
> > always seems to happen at inopportune times.
>
> It doesn't *have* to. You can adjust this with tune2fs's -c flag: check
> the man page for details.
>
> Whatever your filesystem is though, I'd recommend a periodic integrity
> check specifically because damage to filesystem metadata is a common
> early warning sign of hard drive failure.

Well, damage to the file system DATA is also an early warning sign,
but you'll most likely never know it happened. :) I know some paranoid
people who run what is basically a disk-scrubber program, computing
checksums on all the files and comparing them with the previous
checksums (taking into account last-modified dates).  What they find
is that, yes, your data is being corrupted too, far more often than
you would like.  Some file systems compute checksums on all blocks,
such as WAFL (the file system running inside Netapps) and ZFS.

-VAL