[mythtv-users] Change filesystem format in place?

Dan Wilga mythtv-users2 at dwilga-linux1.amherst.edu
Mon Jul 13 18:23:02 UTC 2015


On 7/13/15 1:42 PM, R. G. Newbury wrote:
> On 07/13/15 10:00, Gordon McCrae wrote:
>> On 13/07/15 14:14, Dan Wilga wrote:
>>> On 7/11/15 10:07 AM, Richard Shaw wrote:
>>>> I currently have a 2TB drive formatted EXT4 and I'm considering
>>>> moving to XFS but I don't have a spare 2TB drive to move the
>>>> recordings to.hase a spare yourself.
>>
>> Also....
>>
>> Why bother? All of my storage is still EXT4 and I've never had a
>> problem, so while XFS (and others) may be the "ideal" in some peoples
>> minds, I don't personally believe the FS choice will make a massive
>> difference to your MythTV experience.
>
> The advantage of XFS is that it allocates massive chunks of disk space 
> at a time. (Effectively making a "sector" some 512M or 1G in size).
> XFS also deletes waaaayyy faster than XFS, which has some advantages 
> now that mythtv does not seem to *ever* delete anything except through 
> auto-delete when it wants the space.
>
> According to phoronix' benchmarks, xfs is a little faster overall than 
> ext4, but nothing amazing for our usage.
>
> I would suggest that you watch for a special at the computer store for 
> an external USB3 drive, buy that, use it to do the re-build, and then 
> use the external to create an archive of all your important data.
I'm in the process of upgrading my server which uses a very old kernel 
to a more modern one, and was surprised to learn how only 
grudgingly-supported JFS now is.

I figured it would be a good idea to use XFS instead. Since I have 7.3 
Tb of recordings, an external drive is really not feasible for the 
conversion. I considered upgrading using fstransform, but the 
possibility of lost data outweighed the lack of ongoing support for JFS, 
so I'm stuck with JFS. (Which is not to say I have any gripes with its 
performance or stability, as it has served me well for the last five years.)


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