Re: [gentoo-user] Good/better/best filesystem for large, static video library?

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 9:18 AM, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
> On 12/25/2012 12:07 PM, Mark Knecht wrote:
>> On Tue, Dec 25, 2012 at 8:33 AM, Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Dec 25, 2012 10:44 PM, "Mark Knecht" <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>> <SNIP>
>>>>    With the previous local drive I used ext3 and have had no problems.
>>>> I'm just wondering if there's a better choice & why.
>> <SNIP>
>>>
>>> For your usage, I think ext3 is the most suitable.
>>>
>>> Do you have another fs in mind?
>>
>> Really, no. ext3 has been fine. I didn't see any real advantage to
>> ext4 myself. Florian offers the removal argument but I've never
>> removed files from this database. It's just movies so the systems just
>> grows over time.
>>
>> I suppose I wondered whether some other filesystem might get through
>> an fsck _much_ faster.
>>
>
> There's really no reason to use ext3 over ext4. Ext4 does have a faster
> fsck.
>
>

If the graph here

http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/Improving_fsck_Speeds_in_Ext4

represents real speed improvement then it's likely worth it to me. The
drive is doubling in size but initially the data isn't. (500GB getting
rsync'ed to 1TB)

As I have no immediate needs for the older drive I will give ext4 a
try and just hang on to the old drive&data for a few months and see
how it goes. I'd do that anyway in case the new drive has an infant
mortality issue show up, but really the backup is the 1TB on the TV
which is stable and in use for over a year with no smartctl issues.
(yet) However that drive is FAT formatted so I don't really want to
depend on it for anything long term.

I wonder if there's anything to be said for changing block sizes, etc.
away from whatever the defaults are? All of the files are currently
between 350MB & 1.2GB so there's never going to be many more than 2K
files on the drive and I'm assuming the rsync operation if file by
file so fragmentation in the beginning, and probably over time, is
going to be pretty low I think.

Thanks for the info.

Cheers,
Mark