On Fri, 2010-12-03 at 14:20 +0100, Peter Kjellström wrote:
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.
+1
Short answer: no XFS is not better than ext3 here.
+1 We'll all move to ext4 with CentOS 6. ext4 is a big improvement over the options available in CentOS 5
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).
+1
Although equivalent issues can arise in XFS [vs. ext3]. http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com/2010/09/xfs-inodes.html
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)
I'd stick with ext3 unless you have a compelling reason to use another FS.
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).