[mythtv-users] Is xfs flaky or is it my drive. Fedora Core 2, XFS, Myth .16 and .17

Brandon Beattie brandon+myth at linuxis.us
Mon Mar 14 16:13:00 UTC 2005


On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 04:01:04PM +0000, Tim Southerwood wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 21:06:45 -0500
> "William" <wmunson at rochester.rr.com> wrote:
> 
> > So my questions to the great users of myth.. 
> > 
> > - Are people using XFS and finding it generally stable or flaky like I find
> > it? 
> 
> I've had XFS running on my home server for a good 2 years now 4 FSs 80-160GB in size each)
> and it's been rock solid.
> 
> At work I have a large disk based backup system running with XFS for about 9 months
> (3 FSs, 2TB, 2TB, 1.2TB) and XFS has certainly been better than JFS. No problems at all (cross fingers)
> and that system sees about 30-60GB of changes every night in an intense burst.
> 
> This is under both 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.
> 
> So it gets my vote.
> 
> Whatever you do, don't use ReiserFS(!)

I can't comment in Reiser since I have used it very little.  From what I
have seen, people try to make reiser up to more than it is, which does
the opposite in getting me to want to use it.  I have used JFS and XFS
for over 2 years on various systems including my MythBackend that runs 5
Maxtor 200GB drives in LVM now (It was raid0 until a few months ago and
when I rebuilt the system I used LVM since it's more functional).  

As for which FS, XFS and JFS are very much alike.  Performance is only
minorly different.  JFS seemed to have a quicker delete on very large
(80GB files) than XFS by 1-2 seconds.  I'm using XFS now though because
it seems to be better in everything else.  XFS also appears to work
better with LVM for resizing/adding/removing drives.  

By far though, the biggest impact on performance is the drive.  I have
tested Hitachi, Western Digital, Maxtor and Seagate drives.  I won't
touch WD ever again because I've had too many drives fail.  Hitachi is
only a little better than WD in my experience.  Maxtor's seem to be very
reliable but seagate has a better warranty, probably as reliable, but
they perform half again as well as the maxtor drives I have.  I've
decided any new drives I buy will be seagate, and thanks to outpost.com,
it's very likely to find the 300GB drives for near $150 (I think they're
$159.99 right now).  They have 16MB cache too.  But comparing a 160GB
seagate to 200GB maxtor (Both with 8MB cache) The seagate runs about
20% faster read times and 30% faster write times than the maxtors.
So... My recommendation is to get seagate drives and run XFS/lvm on top
of them.

BTW, the only flakiness I have seen in most FS's lately are caused by
disk problems, not FS design problems.

--Brandon


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