XFS vs EXT4

[nahoR]

I bought a new 4TB hdd for my HP microserver. I am considering using XFS as filesystem. I have searched the great intertubes for some info but most threads on forums and such are relatively old (2008 - 2012)

I have also watched this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMcVdZk7wV8

It seems like there are quite extensive on going development on XFS compared to EXT4

Also I have read that XFS are prone to zero-ing files when the system crashes or on power failures. I could not find anything regarding whether or not this is fixed or if this is just a limitation of the filesystem.

Are there any reasons not to use XFS, and rather EXT4 and vica versa?

I was planning on making the disk spindown using hdparm. I read that cache writes for EXT4 is every 5 seconds and XFS is every 30 seconds. Does this wake the disk up? Should one then rather use the write_cache=off configuration for the disk?

 

[Tinuva]

Considering Redhat 7 will use XFS as default over EXT4, you can't go wrong with it.

One instance where XFS is required, if EXT4 maxes out at 16TB, which means if you want a partition bigger than that (most of our Backup servers) then EXT4 is just not an option.

The write caching won't wake up your disks for nothing, only if something actually need to happen on the drive. The defaults are usually fine for most situations, even when you do want the hard drive to power down, it will still only happen if it is idle for long enough.

 

[ponder]

Also I have read that XFS are prone to zero-ing files when the system crashes or on power failures. I could not find anything regarding whether or not this is fixed or if this is just a limitation of the filesystem.

http://lwn.net/Articles/272985/

http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg12249.html

 

[ponder]

XFS was my goto FS in the past and I never had any issues with it. I switched to ext4 when it became stable as certain things were a bit faster (dealing with lots of small files for example) but this is in a desktop/laptop environment but this should not be an issue on a file server where I suspect you will be storing your *cough* linux iso images

Next time round when I do a fresh install I'll be trying XFS again.

Go for XFS I say.

 

[nahoR]

Cool beans, thanks for the inputs.

XFS it is then

 

[garyc]

Phoronix has just posted some benchmarks of EXT4 vs. XFS vs. Btrfs on Linux 3.14 and 3.15. Overall Btrfs came out top, with XFS ahead of EXT4.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux_315_hddfs&num=1

 

[Tinuva]

Yeah but the problem is, on most distributions you have a far older version of BTRFS, and that Phoronix review is on the latest kernel which is not even on final version yet, and the final released version, which is not in most distributions either. So while it is faster in that benchmark, I don't think people will get it that soon, unless they manually compile and install the kernel.