Linux fileserver: Which filesystem to use?

[AtariJeff]

I'm considering moving the video and personal data HD's out of the Sage box and onto their own fileserver. I've had good luck in the past with the Linux softraid setups so I would go with something similar again. For the video drive (and maybe the personal stuff) I would probably be going with a LVM setup to make expansion easier. What would be recommended for a filesystem and cluster size for the video drive? Now that I'm getting into HiDef the file sizes are getting bigger and bigger

[something fishy]

Jarods guide for setting up MythTV on Redhat recommends the following which should also be applicable for Sage:

The 2.6 kernel series includes several journaling file systems, some of which are a bit better suited for use with large files -- like Myth recordings -- than Red Hat's default file system, ext3. However, Red Hat doesn't let you use anything else at system install time, unless you type in "linux <otherfs>" at the boot: prompt when firing up the installer CD, where <otherfs> is something along the lines of reiserfs, jfs or xfs. I'd *highly* recommend a custom partitioning scheme rather than auto-partitioning, with a dedicated /video (or similar) partition for storage of all your recordings. Previously, XFS was my personal recommendation for the file system to use for such a purpose, but some additional stability issues with using XFS on Fedora Core's stock kernels have been brought to my attention. In the case where you're stacking software RAID, LVM and XFS all together, stack overflows tend to crop up. I'm still running XFS myself, and have for ages without a problem, but I'd have to lean toward suggesting JFS right now, so boot the installer with "linux jfs", then choose JFS for your /video partition. ReiserFS is also an option, though I believe JFS performs a bit better (XFS is even better still, at least, when its stable...). An example partitioning setup can be found below.

At the Installation Type screen, you want to choose a Custom installation (rather than Personal Desktop, Workstation or Server), because none of the defaults give us everything we need and/or add junk we don't need.

On the Disk Partitioning Setup screen, choose to Manually partition with Disk Druid. A suitable custom partitioning setup is as follows (assuming a single IDE hard drive):

Partition Mount Point Size Format
/dev/hda1 /boot 50-100MB ext3
/dev/hda2 swap same as RAM (ex: 512MB) swap
/dev/hda3 / 8-12GB ext3
/dev/hda5 /video Everything else jfs

Be sure to choose JFS (or XFS or ReiserFS) as the partition format type for the /video partition, as the selection will default to ext3. Note that there's really no point in using anything but ext3 on / and /boot. Red Hat tests ext3 heavily, its the only one that is pretty well guaranteed to be problem-free for / and /boot. Those expecting to add additional hard drives to their system for more video storage might want to set the partition type for hda5 to LVM, then create a logical volume over the top of it, formatted JFS. That'll allow you to increase the size of your /video partition transparently across multiple drives (which is exactly what I'm doing w/three 200+ GB drives in my master backend).

http://wilsonet.com/mythtv/fcmyth.php#intro

Regards
Eric