[CentOS] XFS or EXT3 ?

Peter Kjellström cap at nsc.liu.se
Fri Dec 3 13:20:02 UTC 2010


On Friday 03 December 2010 13:55:28 Keith Roberts wrote:
> There was a similar thread about which is the best FS for
> Centos.
> 
> I'm using ext3, and wondered if XFS would be more 'data
> safe' than ext3.

'data safe' is certainly not something easy to define. Short answer: no XFS is 
not better than ext3 here. Longer answer: Both are journaled, ext3 typically 
pushes data to disk quicker, neither are check-summed, ext3 is more widely 
used, neither does replication, XFS has some corner cases (I have seen 
strangeness with very full filesystems and also it's not recommended for 32-
bit CentOS).

In the end the only thing that'll keep your data safe are backups.
 
> I had a 100GiB ext3 partition, and it took up 1.75GiB for FS
> administration purposes. I reformatted it to XFS, and it
> only used 50.8MB!

Oversimplified: XFS sets data structures up as you go, ext3 does it from 
start. Also, the default for ext3 is to reserve space (see the -m option).
 
> I now have a fresh new drive to install my root Centos
> system onto, and wondered about creating the partitions
> as XFS?

ext3 is default => extremely well tested => good choice (IMHO)
 
> What about the XFS admin tools - do these get installed when
> you format a partition as XFS from anaconda, or are they a
> seperate rpm package, installed later?

They are in a separate rpm (xfsprogs, repository: extras).

/Peter
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