Nathan Grennan wrote: > 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 Here is the story, if not somewhat outdated, that I have learned over 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. > > 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. BTW, data=writeback is no guarantee of a performance boost. However, the test was done with 2.4 which also gave data=journal a performance boost in certain cases. In any case, Bruce Guenter's testing showed that ordered and writeback does not result in any performance benefit at all. http://untroubled.org/benchmarking/2004-04/2.6.5-gentoo/ Check out Jeff Mahoney's views on XFS and ext3. http://linux.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/suse-102-ditching-reiserfs-as-it-default-fs/#comment-28534