[CentOS] which FS is appropriate for a 2TB-sized partition?

Mon Mar 8 18:25:11 UTC 2010
Peter Kjellstrom <cap at nsc.liu.se>

On Monday 08 March 2010, Khusro Jaleel wrote:
> Thanks to all of you for your help, and especially Tim Shubitz who faced
> the same problem and his solution worked perfectly for me.
>
> However, now that I have properly created a GPT partition of size 2.7TB,
> which filesystem is best on it? This filesystem will be used to store
> backups of various other linux systems, so the files will be mostly small,
> however some systems do host big movie files and sometimes SVN dumps, and
> DB dumps can get a little big. I am going to be using rsnapshot to do the
> backups, so perhaps I should be careful about the number of inodes I create
> and try to maximise them?
>
> I am thinking of using XFS, but am not sure. I seem to have heard in the
> past that one should avoid EXT3 on such huge filesystems, but I can't find
> a reference or proper justification for it. JFS is another option but then
> some mailing list threads online say it has lost data for them so I'm a bit
> confused as to what is best to use in my scenario.

My thoughts on this are roughly:
 * 2.7T isn't really big ext3,xfs,jfs,etc. should all be fine
 * We've run XFS alot, but still, it's a lot less mainstream than ext3
 * Ext4 is still a tech preview in 5.4
 * We have alot of data on Lustre-style ext3 (in the range 4-8T), no issues

Boils down to: Use what you're comfortable with (XFS is typically faster for 
us but ext3 certainly won't break down at this scale).

/Peter

> As for XFS I have read that a UPS is necessary and this is not a problem
> since these machines are already connected to a UPS (and that UPS has a
> backup as well).
>
> Any help appreciated, thanks,
>
> Khusro
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