[Discuss] question about hdd partition

[David Bronaugh]

Lionel Widdifield wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 09:43:29PM +0530, J.Bakshi wrote:
>   
>> Just here I like to ask one important question. which one is faster EXT2 or 
>> EXT3/reiserfs etc. ? I am always interested to have a faster file system in 
>> my home linux PC.
>>     
>
>  Ext3 is slower than Ext2. That is the only given.
>
>  Ext2/3 are traditional style filesystems, with the privision ext3 does
> metadata logging. Reiserfs is nothing close. Reiserfs, jfs, xfs are all
> b*tree based filesystems.
>   
EXT3 is actually quite divergent from EXT2. It supports extents now, 
some form of tree-based indexing of directories (not sure which type of 
tree), and so on.

Also, EXT3 is not always slower than EXT2. The journal can actually 
speed things up in some cases. This is due to data transfer being more 
or less limited by seeking rather than by raw data rate.
>  If you use your filesystem as a database (ie randomly accessing 1 file in
> 10,000 without directory listings) then reiserfs is incredible.
>
>  My squid proxy cache saw an observed 300%+ increase in speed when its
> partition was reformated as reiserfs. If you know how reiserfs works this is
> no suprise.
>   
Have you tried XFS? From what I've seen it is the best general-purpose 
filesystem, though I'm less than confident about its ability to retain 
data in the event of sudden power loss.

David Bronaugh