[PLUG] Replacing hard drive

[Rich Shepard]

On Thu, 2 Sep 2004, Jeme A Brelin wrote:

> I really don't mean this to be any kind of flamewar instigator, but is
> there really a reason to use ext3 anymore?  I have one old system with an
> ext3 filesystem and it still has to fsck pretty regularly (it gets powered
> down alot and the system forces a fsck every so many mounts) and we've
> seen plenty of issues on this very list with folks running out of inodes
> and stuff like that.
>
> So why bother with the old system?

  First, that's the fs I've used on this box since it became available (with
the 2.2.x kernel series?) and have had absolutely no problems. All the new
boxes run reiserfs, except for the new laptop.

  When I asked Emperor Linux why they insisted on ext3 rather than reiserfs
they told me that in their experience the former was more stable, more solid
and worked better.

  Personally, I doubt that it matters much. As it turns out with the
'needs_recovery' flags set on /dev/hda1 and /dev/hdb1, it was fortunate that
the filesystem is ext3. The rescue disks have utilities for ext2/3 but not
for reiserfs. As a matter of fact, Knoppix wouldn't boot on this box with
the problems on both drives; it hung trying to interpret /etc/fstab. Tom's
root boot disk to the rescue! And it has ext3 tools; perhaps reiserfs, but
we didn't look for any.

  We each use systems differently and have different expectations of
reliability. I've had no problems with either ext3 or reiserfs so I'm a
filesystem agnostic.

Rich

-- 
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>