On Fri, 20 Jun 2008 at 10:34am, John R Pierce wrote > Jim Perrin wrote: >> Nope. This is just a long-standing performance thing. You can tune >> ext3 to perform better, but on a 3ware card xfs will win, hands down. >> > > of course, XFS can also fail spectacularly. ext3fs fully journals all > metadata updates. I'm sure this is a major portion of the performance > differences on writes. Every FS can fail spectacularly. XFS (obviosly) journals as well, but it doesn't force an "ordered" mode as ext3 does by default. However, even if you mount ext3 with "data=writeback" (which is roughly analogous to XFS' journaling mode), ext3 still doesn't perform nearly as well as XFS on 3ware. -- Joshua Baker-LePain QB3 Shared Cluster Sysadmin UCSF