Wiki page - which file system in sd card?

William Kenworthy billk at iinet.net.au
Mon Feb 2 09:54:17 CET 2009


On Mon, 2009-02-02 at 09:42 +0100, Fernando Martins wrote:
> W.Kenworthy wrote:
> > I have to disagree here - because my own opinion is that ext2/3 are not
> > the best for every purpose, and are demonstrably a poor choice for OSM
> > maps on an SD card for instance.
> > Last I heard reiserfs3 is still being maintained, and it has some real
> > advantages for OSM maps (reiserfs doesnt have inode limits like ext2/3
> > does), and is much faster (against ext3).  
> Well, I've seen often claims as yours (and never recall the opposite) 
> and it is also my subjective perception, using regularly a system with 
> ext2 and reiserfs in two partitions of the same hard disk. I made my 
> choice base on space usage. I'll look for some benchmarks on performance 
> later on.
> 
> > ...There is a certain amount of YMMV with file system choices depending on
> > your usage scenarios, but personally I would really like to use reiserfs
> > and dump ext2/3 and all the problems they cause on the FR (lost
> > data/corrupted filesystems, slow performance, ...) that I have.
> >
> >   
> I would not expect to read about ext3 corruptions?? I know it doesn't do 
> checksums after saving blocks in the disk, but is reiserfs doing it?
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Fernando


This is not read on someones website - but my own real world experience
- ext2/3 actually loses data on a regular basis in some scenarios (like
>100000 OSM maps on an SD card which is relevant here :).  I am using
data=journal which I understand should give more protection with some
penalty in speed, but it still happens.

I did read a recent post about how fast ext2/3/4 is and the fact came
out that they default to minimum protection to ensure good speed - while
most other file systems are biased for protection.  When in an
oranges/oranges scenario, ext4 (I think) was pulled back to the bunch.
I have not heard of any tests on the safest settings and rankings on
filesystems - not sure they would be useful as there is a very wide
variety of usage scenarios where one would be better than others.  So my
favouring reiserfs is because while I have had problems at times, they
are far less intrusive that losing whole systems and data that have
happened to me using ext2 or ext3.

BillK






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