[CentOS] Calling All FS Fanatics

[Nathan Grennan]

Kirk Bocek wrote:
> Now that I've been enlightened to the terrible write performance of 
> ext3 on my new 3Ware RAID 5 array, I'm stuck choosing an alternative 
> filesystem. I benchmarked XFS, JFS, ReiserFS and ext3 and they came 
> back in that order from best to worst performer.
>
> I'm leaning towards XFS because of performance and because centosplus 
> makes kernel modules available for the stock kernel.
>
> How's the reliability of XFS? It's certainly been around long enough.
>
> Anyone care to sway me one way or another?
>
  Here is the story, if not somewhat outdated, that I have learned over 
time.

XFS, fast, but can fail under load, does XORs of data, so a bad write, 
as in power failure, can mean garbage in a file. It is meta-data only 
journaling. Also slow on deletes.

JFS, reasonable fast, not popular, read of lots of bugs last time I 
looked into it a few years ago, again meta-data only journaling.

ReiserFS v3, very buggy, meta-data only, and not well maintained at this 
point. Bad writes can lead to zeros in your files.

ReiserFS v4, sounds great, may be everything I want in a filesystem, but 
isn't in the kernel yet. Can do data journaling in addition to meta-data 
only.

ext3, works for me. It is meta-data only by default, but does it in s a 
such a way to minimize the risk much more than other filesystems. Also 
has writeback mode which is like other filesystems if you are looking 
for better performance. Also has full data journalling mode, which is 
atomic and is actually faster than the other two in certain situations.