I also recommend reiserfs. I'm a laptop user, and just converted my filesystems from xfs to reiserfs for performance reasons. With xfs, backing up my root filesystem (325000-350000 files) would take a bit over 10 minutes usually. With reiserfs, that time is down to 6-7 minutes. It just can't be beat (IMO) for handling lots and lots of small files.
Still, xfs has many nice features, including a defragmentation utility (although I consider xfs_fsr to be a little brain-damaged...why not defragment free space also...and thus pack files closer to the front of the filesystem where the best performance is???). I have experience with ext3, but others have had nothing but good things to say. So any of reiserfs, xfs, or ext3 would serve you well, and your choice of what filesystems/partitions/volumes you create is probably more important for long-term performance. -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
