[vox-tech] Reiserfs v. Ext3

[Ted Deppner]

On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 07:50:45AM -0800, Bob Scofield wrote:
> Within the next 2 or 3 weeks I plan to do a Debian install in my SuSE 
> partition.  Is there any reason why I would choose Reiserfs over Ext3, or 
> vice versa?

I've used both reiser and ext3 extensively over the years for multi device
disk arrays, but never reiserfs as a root partition.  I can say that I
have never "lost" a filesystem using either filesystem (except due to
complete drive failure), that being 13 years for ext2/3 and maybe 5 to 8
for reiser.

So I trust both.  However, during problems, I've found that reiser
sometimes takes longer than ext2/3 for recovery operations, and sometimes
several passes to actually fix all the problems, and I've had more
failures of the filesystem itself with reiser than I've had with ext2/3.
Sometimes ext2fsck takes multiple passes too, but it always tells you if
that's what is needed and does it itself.  They've been recoverable, but
the reiserfsck seems to take longer than an ext2/3 fsck.  I've had
multiple hardware failures on both filesystems, and sometimes doing disk
recovery before I could even attempt to do filesystem recovery.

In the late 90's it was common for ext2 to have a error or two crop up
several times a year requiring an fsck (on heavily used drives in an ISP
type setting).  I've not had that happen in the last 4 or 5 years with
recent ext2/3 file systems.  I presently prefer ext3 because of the easy
fallback to ext2 and excellent fsck tools available.  Partition imaging
programs, and partition manipulation programs (eg Partition Magic) have
had support for ext2 for years.

Also, considering recovery options for a root volume, you're talking
rescue disks, so you need to make sure your recovery disk of choice has
good support, and recent versions of the tools for your chosen filesystem.

-- 
Ted Deppner
http://www.deppner.us/