I have just ordered Suse 10.0. Before I receive and install it, I need
to decide on a file system.

Would someone please tell me what the main differences are between ext3
and ReiserFS.

Thank you,
Darlene

"D Scott" <the_scott@nospamcharter.net> wrote in message
news:RxJBf.118$_65.27@fe06.lga...
>I have just ordered Suse 10.0. Before I receive and install it, I need to
>decide on a file system.
>
> Would someone please tell me what the main differences are between ext3
> and ReiserFS.

ReiserFS has had journaling for longer. Lots of people like it and have
experience with it for that reason and others, including its good support
for having many thousands of files in the same directory. I've found
ReiserFS to be extremely unstable when a RAID array is in the process of
having a disk fail.

Ext3 now includes journaling, and uses a fairly recent technique called
"htrees" to handle directory information and deal with the large number of
files you may put in a single directory: that used to be a huge problem for
web caches, news servers, and mail servers using Maildir format under ext2,
but it's been solved for ages now with ext3.

I find ext3 to be more stable under heavy load and when hardware fails: it
doesn't scribble all over the filesystem and corrupt it, leaving scattered
randomly named files in weird places, as ReiserFS does when a drive fails
under RAID5. I've seen that happen maybe half a dozen times now. (I've
worked with quite a few RAID arrays over the last 2 years, for local storage
and for commercial testing.)

D Scott wrote:
> I have just ordered Suse 10.0. Before I receive and install it, I need
> to decide on a file system.
>
> Would someone please tell me what the main differences are between ext3
> and ReiserFS.
>
AFAIK, most current distributions come with the ext2 and 3 file systems by
default, whereas the reiser one must be installed by the user/admin.
Consequently, I would expect that more people use ext3 these days than
reiser, and perhaps more than ext2 as well. More important, if you have
problems, if you are using ext2 or ext3, more people could help you.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
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/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 07:55:00 up 4 days, 23:22, 6 users, load average: 4.17, 4.19, 4.18

In comp.os.linux.setup D Scott <the_scott@nospamcharter.net>:
> I have just ordered Suse 10.0. Before I receive and install it, I need
> to decide on a file system.

> Would someone please tell me what the main differences are between ext3
> and ReiserFS.

Personally tossed reiserfs ages ago, it hasn't proven to be stable
to me, saw it breaking numerous times. Never ever any problems
with ext3, it's rock solid.

Good luck

--
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)
mail: echo zvpunry@urvzvat.qr | perl -pe 'y/a-z/n-za-m/'
#bofh excuse 129: The ring needs another token

"Jean-David Beyer" <jeandavid8@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:7FKBf.32296$jd5.14972@trnddc02...
>D Scott wrote:
>> I have just ordered Suse 10.0. Before I receive and install it, I need
>> to decide on a file system.
>>
>> Would someone please tell me what the main differences are between ext3
>> and ReiserFS.
>>
> AFAIK, most current distributions come with the ext2 and 3 file systems by
> default, whereas the reiser one must be installed by the user/admin.
> Consequently, I would expect that more people use ext3 these days than
> reiser, and perhaps more than ext2 as well. More important, if you have
> problems, if you are using ext2 or ext3, more people could help you.

SuSE uses reiserfs by default, and has since at least SuSE 9.0.

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:

> SuSE uses reiserfs by default, and has since at least SuSE 9.0.

Does the Suse auto install allow a choice or does it automatically pick
Reiser?

Oh, and thanks.

D Scott <the_scott@nospamcharter.net> wrote:

> Would someone please tell me what the main differences are between ext3
> and ReiserFS.

Please see: "Journaling Filesystems Comparison" on
http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Filesystems/

I wrote:
> D Scott <the_scott@nospamcharter.net> wrote:
>
>> Would someone please tell me what the main differences are between ext3
>> and ReiserFS.
>
> Please see: "Journaling Filesystems Comparison" on
> http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Filesystems/

And also "ReiserFS", linked from the same index page.

25 Jan 2006 13:04 UTC, Michael Heiming typed:
> Personally tossed reiserfs ages ago, it hasn't proven to be stable
> to me, saw it breaking numerous times. Never ever any problems
> with ext3, it's rock solid.

You can't go wrong with ext3.

I briefly tested ext3 (full journalling) against Reiser3 on a relatively
large news spool containing loads of small files (perfect for Reiser
apparently) and it just blew it away. Reiser3 was at least half the speed
of ext3 on that particular disk.

D Scott wrote:
> Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>
>> SuSE uses reiserfs by default, and has since at least SuSE 9.0.
>
> Does the Suse auto install allow a choice or does it automatically pick
> Reiser?
>
> Oh, and thanks.
>
>

SUSE allows you to choose (but you have to choose it), Reiserfs has
been in SUSE since the 6.x series and became the default around 6.4 or
7.0. Not sure what you mean by "auto install".

I prefer the live resizability of reiserfs, I have had problems
with both ext3 and reiserfs. If you're using SUSE, I'd go with
reiserfs, if you use Red Hat, I'd go with ext3.

There is a potential hash collision problem with reiserfs. I've
seen it once... I've had ext3 that were unrecoverable.