[CentOS] Centos 5 on Large Disks.

[Anup Shukla]

Johnny Hughes wrote:
> James A. Peltier wrote:
>> Johnny Hughes wrote:
>>> I know that XFS gets all the press about being a great performing file
>>> system ... but if you want the best stability on CentOS, you should at
>>> least consider ext3 instead.
>>>
>>> I have worked very hard to get stable code for xfs in centos-4 and
>>> centos-5, and lots of people use it, but (IMHO) ext3 is still much more
>>> stable with the CentOS Kernels.
>>>
>>> That is my $0.02 ... I'm sure other people will tell you I am all hosed
>>> up :D
>>>
>> EXT3 performance is lacking in many areas and its support for larger
>> file systems is still a problem.  However, it is rock solid and
>> hopefully EXT4 will address the performance and file system limit issues.
>>
> 
> I don't disagree with that assessment, however newer versions of ext3
> have switches to use to improve performance and they work on bigger file
> systems.
> 
> Still, ext3 support is indeed lacking on larger filesystems and yes,
> hopefully ext4 will address this.
> 
> But ... still, if spending a fortune on HUGE drives for an enterprise
> file system I would still think that one should at least see if ext3
> will meet their needs before automatically shifting to XFS.  I have seen
> many a filesystem be unrecoverable with XFS, especially on 4K stack
> systems (which CentOS i386 is).
> 
> Believe me, I have personally put a lot of time and effort into the xfs
> filesystem modules that are in CentOS Plus and CentOS Extras ... and I
> use them in some places, but I just want to be on record saying that
> ext3 is more stable and I recommend its use unless it just
> _WILL_NOT_WORK_, that's all :D
> 
> Thanks,
> Johnny Hughes
> 
> 

I am not an expert in filesystems.
But, yes, in all these years on Linux, i have never found ext3 go bad 
for me ever.

Infact, i have never tried any other fs till date.

Going by the comments and views of everyone, i would prefer to go with ext3.

The drive is a large one, but i have no particular need to make one big 
partition on it.

I can as well have several small partitions  (in fact thats what i want) 
with each partition being the data store for 1 mogstored daemon.

Now i am not sure if thats the best possible solution, but i still got 
time to implement it and do my benchmarks.

For now, ext3 is surely the fs of choice. Cannot afford to lose anything 
thats going to be stored on this server.

A big thanks to everyone.

Regards,
A.S