Which Partition Types Are Superior?

digitalmonkey2k1 writes: "I am currently planning on running an Apache web server and a small ftp on my pc. There are so many file systems that Linux can support now that I'm not certain what ones should be used for certain features. If anyone knows of a comparison list between them, somthing to give a pro/con method of deciding the best sort of configuration It would be greatly appreciated."

Comments

Get a journaled FS

[chrysalis]

XFS, ReiserFS, JFS or EXT3. Get a journaled FS. The reason is that as long as your system is up and running, having a fs like ext2 is no problem. But if you ever have crashes, long fsck (that something fail) means downtime. And for production servers, this is definitely something to avoid.
XFS and ReiserFS are the more mature fs IMHO (on Linux) . I run EXT3 on systems that were previously running EXT2, because it's easy to upgrade. But I had some troubles with EXT3 not so long ago (corrupted files during a compilation, not even after a crash) .
ReiserFS is the best if you have a lot of small files. Both for performance and space. XFS is believed to be better for large files.
Also, if you need performance, FS is one thing, but software is another thing. Apache is probably the slowest web server out there (although very powerful (altough less than Roxen and Caudium :)) .
Running Zeus, Tux or (for static content) WebFS will give you a huge performance increase, even on a slow filesystem.

Which I would choose

[1stflight]

For Linux, I've got to say that with the right hardware (fast drives) any of the newer journaling filesystems would be excellent. Why?
1. Data protection - the journaling systems Reiserfs, Ext3, XFS; etc offer far better and faster recovery than Ext2 does
2. Configurable, though I've never found a need to do it, you can set the block sizes in Ext2 and 3 to optimize it for larger files or smaller ones

What to stay away from fat/vfat/fat32. Why?
1. No security, period

*clink, clink* just my two cents..

ReiserFS

[abcdefg23562]

I would use ReiserFS, it has always worked good for me.
The best part is the journalling, if your machine with a 50 gig drive loses power and reboots, you do not have to go through a lengthy fsck, this would greatly decrease the boot time of your server.

My choices

[secondsun]

I used ext2 about a year or so ago. I didn't mind the fscks (I only had a 4 GB drive) but 2 times it didn't work and I had to maunally fix some files. Then I got reiserfs and to this day I have had no troubles (short of a tree rebuild every few months just to improve speed).

I did have a vfat drive (40 GB) that had a whole bunch of stuff from a when I used windows (98 SE then 2000 then XP) then I reinstalled and used it as a secondary drive. Worked for a few months until the partition table became corrupt, NOrton couldn't fix it and well here I am. (It is now a 40 GB reiser fs partition.)

Secondsun

Re:Partition != File System

[evildead]

reisferfs doesn't have backup and restore utilities, which can make like more than ... interesting.

And no, tar is not an option, no matter what some Nameless Kernel Guru says. I've found that tar and cpio are awfully fragile and resource hoggish when it comes to backing up lots of data.

Re:My preferred partition type is...

[mmontour]

It's nice to have some type 8e around too - Linux LVM. Logical volume management lets you do some cool things, like re-sizing your partitions with the data in place. You can add free space to a logical volume with reiserfs while it's "live", although you have to unmount the volume if you want to shrink it. *Very* handy when you don't know at install-time exactly how much space is going to be taken up by your /home, /usr, /var/log, etc.

Of course the Amiga "RDB" partitioning scheme had its nice points too. Linux can read it, but I don't know if there are any Linux tools to create one.

A crypto filesystem?

[magi]

Is there any stable crypto filesystem for Linux?

I found a "CFS", but the version was just for kernel 2.2.x. I didn't find a 2.4 port.

SuSE 7.3 ads say it has a "CryptoFS". Does it work well? Where can I get it, if I don't want to install SuSE?

An easy-to-use crypto fs would be enormously important especially for laptops in corporate world. I think W2k or XP have some kind of encryption options, and if Linux can't provide a good alternative, it may be a problem in more paranoid companies.

Of normal filesystems, I've found ReiserFS stable on my two machines during my 6 months of use. I converted from ext2 after it corrupted mysteriously. Unfortunately, RH still doesn't support ReiserFS, even optionally, which I think is really silly. SuSE and Mandrake do.

Re:Short answer:

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a real story from my personal experience. I've used ext2 for many years without trouble. I've used reiserfs for about a 1.3 years mostly without trouble. The only real problem with reiserfs is that if you are using a disk that develops bad blocks, there is no graceful way to continue using that disk. Ext2 allows you to map out bad blocks, whereas reiserfs does not have a graceful way to do this.

When one of my reiserfs partitions developed bad blocks, I had to use a low-level scsi reformat utility to fix the disk, and then reinstall. With ext2 you don't have to take that kind of dramatic action. You can easily inform the ext2 file system where the bad blocks are, and it will map them as unusable. I love the reiserfs, and it works well, but its userland utilities are not as rich or as flexible as ext2. As time goes on, this will change. However, at present, the inability of reiserfs to handle bad blocks gracefully could be something that might bite you if your hardware ever becomes flakey.

reiserfs, xfs and caching

[anden]

After using reiserfs for a year++ and now having switched to xfs, my recommendation is the latter. There is a simple reason to this: reiserfs caches a lot. Even with 512Mb RAM I always ended up with swap after doing a few file transfers, and for a ftp site that is not so good, at least not if you plan to do other things with the computer as well.
A simple solution is of course to disable swap, but that is only a workaround. Until reiserfs gets a little lighter on caching, my recommendation is definitely xfs.