[CentOS] XFS or EXT3 ?

Fri Dec 3 13:31:12 UTC 2010
Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org>

On Fri, 2010-12-03 at 14:20 +0100, Peter Kjellström wrote: 
> On Friday 03 December 2010 13:55:28 Keith Roberts wrote:
> > There was a similar thread about which is the best FS for
> > Centos.
> > I'm using ext3, and wondered if XFS would be more 'data
> > safe' than ext3.
> 'data safe' is certainly not something easy to define. 

+1 

> Short answer: no XFS is not better than ext3 here. 

+1  We'll all move to ext4 with CentOS 6.  ext4 is a big improvement
over the options available in CentOS 5 

> In the end the only thing that'll keep your data safe are backups.
> > I had a 100GiB ext3 partition, and it took up 1.75GiB for FS
> > administration purposes. I reformatted it to XFS, and it
> > only used 50.8MB!
> Oversimplified: XFS sets data structures up as you go, ext3 does it from 
> start. Also, the default for ext3 is to reserve space (see the -m option).

+1

Although equivalent issues can arise in XFS [vs. ext3].
<http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com/2010/09/xfs-inodes.html>

> > I now have a fresh new drive to install my root Centos
> > system onto, and wondered about creating the partitions
> > as XFS?
> ext3 is default => extremely well tested => good choice (IMHO)

I'd stick with ext3 unless you have a compelling reason to use another
FS.  

> > What about the XFS admin tools - do these get installed when
> > you format a partition as XFS from anaconda, or are they a
> > seperate rpm package, installed later?
> They are in a separate rpm (xfsprogs, repository: extras).