On Thu, 2005-09-15 at 11:40, Brian D. McGrew wrote: > Good morning: > > I've got a brand new server with 6x250GB SATA drives in a RAID 5 > configuration that I'm going to run FC4 to serve up NFS and Samba. > > What would you recommend as the optimum file system type and maximum > partition sizes for this box. > > I'm going to have /, /boot, swap and /data if a single large (>1.1TB) > partition is safe. If not, how big can I safely make such a partition? > What kind of files are you planning to store on the large partition? How much time can you spend running fsck if there is a problem? What kind of backup scheme are you using? Smaller file systems can be checked quicker if you need to run fsck at some point. ext3 is a good general purpose file system that in my experience has very few problems and has a good set of tools for recovery. I would trust ext3 over most other file systems. Only reason to choose another file system type is particular performance improvements. I am currently using a 1TB XFS file system to store mostly large files (2GB is average in size). This is across four 300GB SATA drives. Been running that since February and have not had any problems. Choose XFS since it appears to delete large files much quicker. Some may prefer JFS for such file systems. Depending on how important the files are that you are storing on the file system you will want to practice recovery of the file system using the raid and LVM tools used to create the file system. I think there are some hard limits around 2TB and/or 8TB depending on what you are doing with the file system. (don't think you can boot from a file system if it is over 2TB for instance).
