On Friday 15 February 2008, Aaron Clark wrote: > xfs: high performance, especially when dealing with many large or > small files; Gets along very well with raid arrays. Noticeably > higher cpu usage than ext3/jfs. IIRC, it aggressively caches its > writes so there is a slight possibility of data loss if your power > goes out suddenly in the middle of a series of writes (I consider > this a very small possibility, it is journalled like the other fs's > on this list so the filesystem will still come up in a consistent > state, you just may be missing some of the data you were writing). > Very good online tools support provided with it.
Sigh. So many myths about journalled filesystems, so little time to squash them. ;-) First of all, you are contradicting yourself. First you say you think the possibility of data loss is slight, then you state at the end that some data loss may occur. The second part is right. Data losses are possible. Journalled filesystems do not prevent this. They deal with filesystem consistency. Second, no journalled filesystem in the whole wide world can prevent occurences of inconsisteny in case of a power cut. None, try as they might. Please commit the last two sentences to permanent memory. The reason for this isn't the cache in your computer's ram but the cache in modern harddrives. If the journal change still resides in the harddrive cache while your power cut occurs, boooom - inconsistency. There is nothing a filesystem - journalled or not - can do about it. If you are really concerned about data loss and filesystem inconsistencies, use a good journalled fs *and* a small UPS that can shut your box down gracefully in case of a power cut. Uwe -- Informal Linux Group Namibia: http://www.linux.org.na/ SysEx (Pty) Ltd.: http://www.SysEx.com.na/ -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
