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I store all my Music CDs, Music, DVD Rips, etc on hard drives for quick access and long term storage. What file system should I use?

I use a bunch of drives glued together in an LVM so being able to grow and shrink would be nice, as well as efficient storage and quick access times. Compatibly is also nice (not having to install kernel drives is a plus).

So, what do you use and why?

Paul Tarjan
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4 Answers4

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I use ext3, because it's stable, well-known, very well supported, and is capable of online growth and offline shrinking. I've tried most of the exotics and typically found them a bit dangerous in the edge cases (bugs in XFS on ARM that regularly trashed filesystems was the most entertaining one).

womble
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you are only debating the file and the operating system.

If you are talking about a long term archiving, I think the right question would be: What storage system do you want to use?

A spindle (HDD) which has to turn around and to consume constantly energy? Or if you put it into a shelf, you almost get a guaranty that after 5-10 years the HDD does not work anymore. CDs DVDs? which are gone after 4-8 years (you actually can expedite this, by putting them on your rear window shelf of your car. Than they might be gone after an afternoon in the sun) or on Tape: The technology they promise us since 20 year that it is going to die, but it seems like it lives for ever.

The new LTFS (Linear Tape File System) makes tape actually a really cool thing. You can use your tape drive as easy as using a Thumb-Drive with a capacity of a single cartridge of 3.000 Gb (compressed).

To answer your questions: Tape is fast: 140MB/s (compressed 280MB/s) Tape is perfect for archiving. Expected live time of a cartridge +30years Tape is compatible. Same cartridge can be used for Linux, Mac-OS and soon Windows Tape with LTFS is easy to use.

Here is a link to an wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTFS

have fun,

0

ZFS or XFS will do you just fine.

Chopper3
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which Operating System do you prefer? If you not focused on a special one I suggest ZFS (OpenSolaris) as well. For Windows you have to go with NTFS. There are some projects porting ZFS technology to other Operating Systems but a native filesystem is always a more stable way.

I use ZFS on a little "filer" with a minimal OpenSolaris installed. I will post a little tutorial as soon as my blog is finished. Maybe you step by but it will take me a few more days. ;-)

Regards Chris

chrw
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