ext3 external journaling

[bersl2]

I recently purchased two hard drives. One is a 36GB Raptor, and the other is a 320GB.

Now, I have up to this point been using ReiserFS and XFS. I haven't had any of the horror stories happen to me, but I figure it's about time I gave ext3 another go.

I noticed that ext3 can put its journal in a separate block device. Since I've got 36GB of faster drive to play with for the OS, swap, and anything else, I figure I might as well try.

A quick glance at the e2progs source and a moderate amount of Google was rather unhelpful on answering a few of the more specific questions, specifically about what size the external journal should be. Before proceeding further, I figure I should ask for opinions, nominally about the listed subject, but feel free to give other advice about filesystems, and maybe even start a filesystem holy war.

 

[sourceninja]

I've always used ext3, I usually do an -o dir_index when fomating the drive with ext3. This seems to speed stuff up. I've never had a problem. I've never tried putting the journal on another block device though, it would be interesting.

 

[Nothinman]

Personally I'd just stick with XFS, and if you really want it can put it's journal (log) on another device too.

As for journal size, the default size for ext3 is 32M IIRC and it looks like the max is 102,400 blocks, so with 4K blocks that would be 400M but that would be insane. You'd have to do a lot of file operations per second or enable data journaling for a 400M journal to be useful.