ext3 vs. reiserfs

[tkoster]

I am starting over, repartitioning my 20 gig harddrive (it's actually my second drive, Windows still lays claim to the first one out of deference to my wife). I actually have two questions.

1)What would be the best way to repartition the drive for linux. That is, what sizes for the various directories and swap files.

2)Which of the new formats will serve me better ext3 or reiserfs?

Thanks

[mstich]

I would opt-in for a third option, xfs.

Apparently it has good performance, and good journaling capabilities.

[bdl]

This is how I've got my drive partitioned, always works for me. I've adjusted the sizing slightly for your 20GB drive (I've got a 40).

/dev/hda1: '/' (root): EXT3 : 1gb
/dev/hda5: SWAP : SWAP : 500MB
/dev/hda6: '/var' : REISERFS : 2gb
/dev/hda7: '/home' : EXT3 : 10GB
/dev/hda8: '/usr' : EXT3 : (remainder of drive, about 6.5GB)

This partitioning scheme pretty much covers all the bases, gives you plenty of room to work with and allows you to keep all your data files (mp3s, oggs, video, etc) in your '/home' partition. You can of course adjust the sizing to better suit your needs, lessen the '/home' partition and add a '/mnt/data' partition for example. Have a look at the Partition mini HOWTO (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/mini/Partition/index.html) for more insight as to how to do it.

[ 14 April 2002: Message edited by: bdl ]

[tkoster]

BDL, why do you switch to reiserfs on /var?
Otherwise you answered my question pretty well.

Acid, te distro I have on hand is Redhat 7.1, though since I'm starting from scratch, I'm thinking about other options as well. I'd like to give Debian a try, but downloading with my slow connection takes way too long. Mandrake always ends up with something broken and in need of tinkering for me. With 8.0 my USB card always had to be reinstalled by hand every time I booted. It just got old.

Mstich, I just don't know enough about xfs to trust it especially with the bad reviews it just got here.

Thanks for your help, all.

[Frith]

Originally posted by acid2000:
<STRONG>I've tried ext3. It was good for a while and then I copied some .vob file, about 14GB worth. After than my 20Gb home partition went from 6Gb free to 20Mb! I have now gone back to ext2. All is now calm.
I've heard that reiser is a bit slower than ext3. xfs is ment to be cack, rubbish and crash prone.
What distro will you be using, I was using MD 8.1, they way have sorted the problems with 8.2 or another distro.
Reiser is tried and tested but I would have a go with ext3 first.</STRONG>

uh, you added 14 gigs to 6 gigs and you're upset because you ended up with 20 gigs?

am I missing something here?

Edit: I just realized that what you wrote made absolutely no sense to me. Sorry.

[ 14 April 2002: Message edited by: Frith ]

[Alex Cavnar, aka alc6379]

I just want to say that XFS is not crash-prone. I have had my system running XFS since day 1 (Installed Slackware 8, then formatted and mv'ed files) and I've had absolutely no trouble. In fact, of the seven partitions I have allocated for Linux, I have only one partition that's not XFS-- my / partition is reiserfs.