carlopmart wrote: > Kwan Lowe wrote: >> On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 10:47 AM, carlopmart <carlopmart at gmail.com> wrote: >>> Hi all, >>> >>> Recently I have installed a centOS 5.4 server to use as a home NAS server. I need >>> to use large files (8GB minimum) inside of it to serve via iSCSI services. Which >>> filesystem do you recommends me to reach maximum performance: xfs, ext3, ext4, gfs2 >>> ....?? >> I don't know if this is still true, but when I last checked a couple >> years ago, the recommendation was for LVM device backed iSCSI targets. >> >> http://osdir.com/ml/linux.iscsi.tgt.devel/2008-09/msg00000.html >> >> With LVMs you'd of course lose the flexibility of file-backed targets >> and the ability to do sparse files are you're intending.. >> >> dd if=/dev/zero of=iqn.2009-12.com.mydomain:storage.disk01.foo.foo >> bs=1 count=0 seek=16G > > LVM was my first option and performance it is very very good with iSCSI, but backup > and restore it is a problem with LVM. For these reason I need to use large files on > this server... Doesn't sparse file use leave you in danger of (a) overcommiting the actual available space, and (b) badly fragmenting the on-disk locations when the space is actually allocated? I think xfs has some support for allocating sparse space at creation time without waiting for real writes, but I don't know how to use it. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com