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