[CentOS] Drive activity every 30sec

nate centos at linuxpowered.net
Tue Jul 8 00:28:22 UTC 2008


Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> there is a bit to be said about that for a notebook.  Particularly if
> you separate /home to its own partition.  I mean why is /boot a ext3
> partition in Centos install?  Why not ext2.  Perhaps / could be too.
> but would you want to put /var/log on a journalling partition?  I guess
> there have been flames all over the place on these default decisions.

For most instances, the faster boot times with a journaled file system
after an unclean shutdown is well worth most any downside to using
ext3. I think the fsck code even for ext2 has been improved, before
ext3 was available it was pretty painfully slow though even for small
disks(e.g. 60GB).

/boot probably doesn't need to be ext3, as it's barely ever accessed
after the system boots unless your installing a new kernel or something,
but it doesn't hurt either(as it's hardly ever accessed).

Fortunately for ext3 users you can "convert" the file system to ext2
just by mounting it as ext2 instead of ext3(provided the journal is
flushed out, which should be done when the file system is unmounted).

Though I really can't imagine why anyone would want to use a non
journaled file system these days. Especially on a laptop where the
chance of an unclean shutdown is much higher than that of a server,
hate those fsck times..

nate




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