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I've ordered a nice big-ass 400 GB drive which will arrive tomorrow.
I've always used the EXT3 file system for my drives, but I was wondering if another file system would be better, or just more appropriate in one way or another, for this, very large, hard drive?

That depends on what you will be doing with the file space. If you are working with large files, then reiserfs may be the better choice.

I ususally stick with ext3 in most cases.

This 400 GB drive will serve as my new /home directory so it will be pretty much a general purpose, all around used drive.

I'd go with Ext3.

Fair enough, I'm going with EXT3, also another good thing about it is that the BSDs can write to it, and I'm really getting to love FreeBSD

As long as you don't plan on sharing the drive with OS X, or Windows, I think Ext3 is just fine. I recently bought a nice big externel drive as well, and I formatted it to Ext3, thinking Linux would be the only thing I'd ever use. Well, I managed to get OS X running on my PC (teeheehee), and Linux filesystems aren't supported out of the box, and from what I hear it isn't too reliable if you get it working. FAT32 would be a good choice if you want complete compatibility with other OS's.

Wally Balljacker wrote:As long as you don't plan on sharing the drive with OS X, or Windows, I think Ext3 is just fine. I recently bought a nice big externel drive as well, and I formatted it to Ext3, thinking Linux would be the only thing I'd ever use. Well, I managed to get OS X running on my PC (teeheehee), and Linux filesystems aren't supported out of the box, and from what I hear it isn't too reliable if you get it working. FAT32 would be a good choice if you want complete compatibility with other OS's.

And that's the only advantage of FAT32, cross platform support, but in all other areas it's owned by pretty much everything, I'd much rather run EXT2 that FAT32 for crying out loud!

Anyway, I've got the drive in, formatted it to EXT3 and now it's serving as my /home partition, I tell ya, 16 mb cache makes a big difference!

I know you've already started using the hard drive, but for future reference, I wanted to ask about the ReiserFS handling large files. I mean, ReiserFS has been working well for me, I've used it for my home directory for over a year and it's never given me a problem, despite my apartment's horrible power outages. I finally bought a UPS because I was worried about losing files, but after witnessing at least a half dozen power outages shut down my computer, I've never lost anything.

I may be mixed up, but I though Reiser was good at handling many small files. I was looking at the MythTV website (Man, do I ever want to build one of those, I think that's my next project.), and the people at Myth seem to think that Reiser is bad for huge files, and recommend xfs or jfs. But since I've been using Reiser on my hard drive for so long, I can't even compare it to the speed of ext3.

What did you plan to use all that space for? I don't do a lot of video, so I don't need a lot of space, yet, but once I save up enough to put together a box for MythTV, I'll need a drive like the one you bought.

Vogateer wrote:I know you've already started using the hard drive, but for future reference, I wanted to ask about the ReiserFS handling large files. I mean, ReiserFS has been working well for me, I've used it for my home directory for over a year and it's never given me a problem, despite my apartment's horrible power outages. I finally bought a UPS because I was worried about losing files, but after witnessing at least a half dozen power outages shut down my computer, I've never lost anything.

I may be mixed up, but I though Reiser was good at handling many small files. I was looking at the MythTV website (Man, do I ever want to build one of those, I think that's my next project.), and the people at Myth seem to think that Reiser is bad for huge files, and recommend xfs or jfs. But since I've been using Reiser on my hard drive for so long, I can't even compare it to the speed of ext3.

What did you plan to use all that space for? I don't do a lot of video, so I don't need a lot of space, yet, but once I save up enough to put together a box for MythTV, I'll need a drive like the one you bought.

Now when I try to remember what I've read in the past, ReisierFS is faster than EXT3 for small files, but not for bigger files, so you're right Vogateer.

What do I use 400 GB for? Well so far I've got 7 GBs of podcasts, which is all TLLTS episodes for 2005 in both mp3, I have an iPod, and OGG, my prefered, format, samething with TWiT. Also, I might have to confess, that I don't always abide by the law, for instance, if I can't buy something from the stores or on the web, I'll just hit my "sources" and "get" it, one example of this is some TV series I really wanted to watch back when I was 5 years old, but we didn't have the right TV channels, and I couldn't get my parents to get them. But to leave that sort of gray-area subject, I also download a lot of video shows like the video of Diggnation, which I find hilarious at times, and also the video of TWiT (It's just more intuitive to watch a video instead of just listening to the audio).

In general I'm pretty good at using up my hard drive space

When you think about it it's not that hard, an average TLLTS episode is about 25 MB, and when you start adding up episodes, it takes quite a bit of space.

Great Scot! You should serve as the official tllts.org archiver, keeping all the past year's episodes and such. I have about 7 GB of music, but if I think something should be accessible on the Internet, I usually don't keep it on my computer, though I might write it to a DVD for archiving if I have any doubts. Of course, I'm not sure how long DVD data lasts, so sometimes I go back and burn fresh CDs or DVDs off any CD that's over 5 years old, once again, only if I think it's important.

I have several pictures from my little Nikon digital camera, and that's quickly filling up space with only 4 megapixel resolution, but I'm still well within the 74 GBs of space I have on my / partition, and have 23 Gb left. The wedding and honeymoon took a big chunk of space, but the pictures are trickling in with the holidays, now. Yeah, the more I look at it, if you start keeping any number of videos, then you're going to need huge amounts of storage. The MythTV site was talking about files over 4 Gbs, so I might have to look into LVM2 and a couple of massive hard drives. Is Patrick still using MythTV? It looks slick slick, but I'm questioning whether I'll get it working with HDTV or not, since that's relatively new, and the harddrive space will surely take a beating with HD quality movie files. Yeah, I'll have to start saving up to try that out.

Vogateer wrote:The MythTV site was talking about files over 4 Gbs, so I might have to look into LVM2 and a couple of massive hard drives. Is Patrick still using MythTV? It looks slick slick, but I'm questioning whether I'll get it working with HDTV or not, since that's relatively new, and the harddrive space will surely take a beating with HD quality movie files. Yeah, I'll have to start saving up to try that out.

I'm not running MythTV anymore. I sold my Hauppauge card to Allan a few months back. When I did I used XFS for my video partitions. XFS handles large files very well. The other thing to setup on a MythTV system LVM for your hard drives. You can continue adding more drives as needed and the file system thinks it's all one hard drive.

Patrick wrote:The other thing to setup on a MythTV system LVM for your hard drives. You can continue adding more drives as needed and the file system thinks it's all one hard drive.

Isn't that like software RAID?

My understanding is that LVM is quite a bit different than RAID. Isn't RAID all about redundancy, with several disks having the same data? LVM seems to act like a layer between the hard drives and the file system.

Without LVM, you partition your drive, and it's pretty much stuck that way unless you want to back up, reformat, and restore; or perform other tricky computer gymnastics to get data moved around. So if you didn't leave enough space for your /usr partition, and you don't have enough room for some new program, your options pretty much suck.

With LVM, such problems are not an issue. You simply tell LVM to take space from one place and put it in the place where it's needed, and it changes it without any reformating, and can do it while the OS is up and running, not interrupting anything. So, if you're /home partition is filling up, and you buy a new hard drive, you use LVM to make that hard drive a part of the /home partition, and as far as the file system knows, it's all one partition, so you can treat two or more disks pretty much like they are one partition, and the rest of the OS doesn't know one way or another. LVM also does some other fancy tricks, but I've only read about it, and haven't had a need for it, and won't have a need for it until I get a computer to play with.

I'm fairly new to the show, so I'm sure I missed out on your MythTV experience, Patrick. I hope it's something worth pursuing, since I don't really want to pour money into it only to come out with frustration. I've usually managed to get things working, but it could be several months before I really get going, so I have some time to dwell on it.

Nice explanation, thanks man!

It's "like RAID" in that if you have 2 drives and one dies, you can lose everything (if a volume spans drives). Of course only RAID setups that do striping and no mirroring have this problem.

Fedora has used LVM for a while, but I wasn't happy with it and don't use it. It's not transparent enough, and there are risks. Personally I plan carefully and leave sections of my disk unpartitioned so I can add to the filesystem when I feel like it. For instance I added a 20 Gig parition on /home/jeff/audio because my podcast archives were filling up my /home partition.