[CentOS] Calling All FS Fanatics

[Steve Bergman]

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 15:03 -0700, Kirk Bocek wrote:
> 
> Steve Bergman wrote:
> > But... if you are certain of your precautions... I've never seen ext2
> > lose a benchmark... ever.
> 
> I'm not certain of anything. That's why I'm asking these questions. :)
> 

I would be interested to see your results if you care to try ext2.  The
kernel guys are pretty well committed to supporting it long term. They
are absolutely *anal* about making changes which could destabilize it in
any way.

As far as data integrity goes, you are at about the same level as ext3
with data=writeback, or most other jounalled filesystems.  It's probably
rather safer than XFS... according to my sources, anyway.

However, with large filesystems, you could be looking at a lengthy fsck
process in the event of an unclean shutdown.  Some say it can take days
on really large raid arrays, but fsck's on my 0.5 terabyte ext3 FS,
which has a nearly identical on disk structure as ext2, takes 8 minutes.

May the Force be with you, and all that sort of rot! ;-)

-Steve