[TriLUG] "Best" file system for a 20TB array - CentOS 5.4

[Lance A. Brown]

Ron Kelley wrote:
> Looking for some feedback on which is the "best" file system to manage
> a 20TB array on CentOS 5.4.  Normally, I would use ext3 with some
> tweaking, but I wonder if xfs (or something else) is better suited to
> manage such a large volume.  We are using this space to store some
> network traffic traces (hundreds of GBs per trace) for various
> customer tests as well as some ISO images for building servers, etc.

I would advise against ext3, especially for large files.  Ext3
filesystems take a major performance hit when deleting large files, at
least on centOS 5 systems.  I recently switched from ext3 to XFS because
of this issue.  XFS has its own issues, but it works better for my
needs, by and large, than ext3.  The large file delete performance issue
completely tanked my 20G Dell R410 NFS server.

--[Lance]

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