Chacham's Journal: Which FS to use

Finally got my Promise FastTrak 2000 to be recognized by Debian. I had to use the FastTrak.o module from Promise's website in the SuSe install disk. Now to figure out which filesystem to use. Standard is ext2, but ext3 seems cool. ReiserFS is also a choice. Hmm... I think I may just go for ext3 and see what happens. I can always reinstall on Sunday.

I am not planning on creating a swap yet. I've got 384 meg, and while not enough to run well, I want to keep the swap off the main disks. I feel silly mirroring swap! So, I'll probably throw an old IDE drive in for that, until I get a cheap SCSI HD and use that for swap. Since I don't need capacity, a SCSI drive can be had for ten or twenty dollars.

Besides, I can then turn off IDE completely. Besides freeing up IRQs, it really isn't needed, though it may even be as 37337 as having a high uptime. :-)

Re:Mirroring Swap

[Chacham]

Never thought of that. I wonder if it actually would crash. How is it any different than a swap off command?

whatever journals...

[mekkab]

I'm not too up on FS's but whatever journals is kool in my book. Nothing I hate more than a full on FSCK.

no reason for ext2

[gmhowell]

There is absolutely zero reason to pick ext2 over ext3. Do ext3. If you decide you don't like it, just remount it as ext2. Finished.

Re:no reason for ext2

[Chacham]

There is absolutely zero reason to pick ext2 over ext3.

I thought there was a space issue. Though, my only real concern was stability.

Do ext3.

Yes, sir!

If you decide you don't like it, just remount it as ext2.

I didn't klnow that was compatible.

Thanx for the info, it's just what I needed to hear.

Re:no reason for ext2

[gmhowell]

There may be some space issues. You have to store the journal after all. But I've got a 2 GB workstation at work (was the only drive I had lying around) with several hundred megs left for /home. This is with wayyy too much 'stuff' on it.

I had ReiserFS as my home partition a while back. But I had some problems with my system, and it took forever and a day to get them ironed out. One of the things I needed was a custom kernel for ReiserFS (this is before most vendors shipped it as default) so I was without /home for while. Something similar happened after I switched to 100% ext3, and I was able to use an old (2.2.x) kernel and mount partitions that way. It's not recommended, and there are now plenty of kernels with both Reiser and ext3 compiled in, but if all you have lying around only supports ext2...

Sometime in the future, Hans will be adding some nifty stuff for ReiserFS. But for now...