Best filesystem for large files

[mojo]

Hey rhysox, (and anyone else with a knowledgeable opinion) after reading your 16 posts, I've come to immediately respect you. Any recommendations on the file system for my linux box? I have about 1.8 TB of space there across 7 different drives. It's an AthlonXP 2500+ Barton core with 768 MB of DDR 400. Although it's a full install of slackware 10.2, most of it's life it's just a really nice NAS. The files I'm storing are all quite large, ranging in size from 500 MB to multiple GB. I connect to it over jumbo frame (9k) gigabit. I've been just using EXT3 for everything, but I keep thinking it might be better to go with maybe reiser or XFS. Performance is pretty important to me, but data integrity and file system recoverability is also very important and why I've been so leery of the newer filesystems in the past.

[rhysox]

Hi mojo, thanks for your respect! Appreciate it, only here to help! =)

ext filesystems are usually the norm for the everyday person, however if you're using that much disk space and require performance, you might want to look at reiserfs. Reiserfs takes up a LOT less disk space due to the block sizes, and you will notice significant speed/performance increases as well as faster searches.

I personally still use ext3, it's very stable, not saying that reiserfs isn't, I just have never had the need for more performance.

Hmm, such a hard thing to give advice about really, it usually comes down to personal preference, I would probably stick to ext3 unless its causing you a problem. Or maybe use different file systems on different partitions/disks? Say for example you wanted performance on a storage disk, use reiserfs/xfs on it, but keep things like the main OS libs/bin on an ext3 drive. Not too sure to be honest, let me know what you think of this.

-rhys

[mojo]

Yeah, every time I think about switching I'm disuaded by the proven stability of ext3. It's not really giving me any problems, I just feel like the "cool kids" are all using one of the newer filesystems.

[rhysox]

"cool kids" haha, how long you been a linux user?

[mojo]

About 3 years now I guess. I started out with Mandrake but it was too limited and I wanted to actually know what was going on, so I moved to slackware and have been pretty happy with that. It's a nice middle ground between Ubuntu and Gentoo.

[kilgoretrout]

I would stay away from reiserfs for TB size partitions. Reiserfs has many advantages, but one big disadvantage is it takes forever to mount TB size reiserfs partitions; we're talking several minutes here. See this discussion for more info:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/6089

If you don't boot up a lot or mount and umount the large partition often this wouldn't be that big an issue. But if you do it's a real pain.

XFS is suppose to be superior for large files, better than reiserfs and ext3, at least that's its claim to fame. However, there are a lot of reports of XFS getting easily corrupted to the point of losing all data, particularly on hard shutdowns. Nonetheless, XFS was developed by SGI for large multimedia files like those used in movie animation and the benchmark articles generally confirm its superiority for dealing with large files.

All that being said, you are not likely to see that significant a speedup to justify the hassle of changing your filesystem from ext3 IMHO.

[mojo]

Well once again then, it looks like I'll just stick with ext3. Thanks for all your thoughts, I'll be sending each of you a penny for them.

[mairving]

Originally Posted by mojo About 3 years now I guess. I started out with Mandrake but it was too limited and I wanted to actually know what was going on, so I moved to slackware and have been pretty happy with that. It's a nice middle ground between Ubuntu and Gentoo.

That is the path that I took except that I ended up with FreeBSD. I personally would take UFS over Ext any day but that isn't a knock on Ext.

[Statica]

Originally Posted by mairving That is the path that I took except that I ended up with FreeBSD. I personally would take UFS over Ext any day but that isn't a knock on Ext.

Similar story.. got tired of Linux and went back to FreeBSD & NetBSD .. 'cept I'm running UFS2. I've had some unpleasant experiences with ext to ever go back to it.

[mojo]

Grr, issues started happening that I thought I had all sorted, but at least I think i know why it's happening now. Most of my linux box is for storage, but one of the 250 GB drives I use exclusively to record TV on from my homebrew DVR. It has it's own 200 GB drive, and I let it use up to 150 GB on the linux drive through a samba share. Recently files started to become well, scrambled. They will randomly freeze, and if you fast forward or rewind you end up in a completely different spot. This only happens on files that happen to get recorded to the linux box, not the local windows drive for the DVR. I took a look at the files and tried to move them around and they went really slow, leading me to think they are pretty fragmented. So I moved them all to a different directory and copied them back. No more fragmentation and problem solved. Or so I thought.

So tonight it started happening again. I've just now realized that it started happening when I added a 3rd tuner, allowing the recording of 3 shows simultaneously. Since the software I use is pretty smart about balancing data loads, with the 2 tuners in the past any one of the 2 possible data locations was only recording one show at a time, but now my linux box can end up recording 2 shows at the same time, which I'm pretty sure is what is causing the problem.

The recordings take up about 2GB per hour, which works out to about 4.5 megabits/s. I have a gigabit network connecting everything, so I'm pretty sure it's not a network issue.

If I changed the one drive in linux from ext3 to XFS you think it would solve the problem, or should I set up a 3rd data location on another drive? One last thing to think about is that the makers of the DVR software (SageTV) recommend a 64K block size, which I have followed for its local drive, but the max for ext3 is 4k, which I've been using thus far.

[mojo]

Well, I've moved to XFS and it's working absolutely great for me. The drive that couldn't handle 2 simultaneous recordings before handles 3 now with no problem. I used to move files across the network to my linux box at 30 MB/s, now I get 45. I'm liking this filesystem a lot.

[rhysox]

Glad you like it.

Best way to learn about linux in my honest opinion is to use a distribution like gentoo or try linux from scratch.

You have to get into it to get it to work properly, but the amount you'll learn is amazing.

I love bsd myself, and that's why i really like gentoo, due to the similar portage system. It allows me to combine the functionality of portage with the large userbase & following of linux.