On Tue, 17 Feb 2009, Bob Barton wrote:

> Hi All
> I am setting up a 2 TB file system to use for AFS volumes on an AFS file 
> server and I am wondering which file system I should use - XFS or ext3. I 
> plan to use Scientific Linux 5.1 or 5.2 x86_64 as the operating system on the 
> file server machine.
> Suggestions, comments and recommendations are very welcome.

Several people have said how wonderful each of XFS and ext3 are,
how long they have used them and never had problems.

I have no experiece of XFS but the only multi-terabyte ext3 filesystem
that I use (as user not sysadmin) had some disk/controller problems
and when we tried to restore the backups verification failed repeatedly
9somewhere between 3 and 4 terabytes I believe).
I don't mean that fsck (I think) reported that the filesystem
was corrupt, but that it ceased to make progress checking for problems.
The sysadmin who actually handled this is on the list and may wish
to give more details, but I understand that he is now uncomfortable
using ext3 for filesystems larger than 2-3 TB.

As I say, we have no way of knowing whether XFS would have been any 
better.

-- 
Dr. Andrew C. Aitchison		Computer Officer, DPMMS, Cambridge
[log in to unmask]	http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~werdna