File system for RAID 5 media server

I just got my RAID 5 (software) array configured in Ubuntu. I formatted it w/ the EXT3 filing system but now i'm having second thoughts. The array is composed of 3x 250Gb Diamondmax 10 drives in RAID 5. I was unaware that the EXT3 fileing system reserves 5% of the total drive space for use by root. Thus, I now have 30Gb of this array that is unusable and I'm wondering if perhaps I should look into using a different file system. I did some research and it looks like the XFS filing system is poopular for larger files and is often used in home media servers. That being said, the XFS file system is not as fault tollerent as the EXT3 file system and I really dont want to have the array crash because the file system got corrupted. It seems as though many people have had great success with XFS but I have run into a few cases where the file system got corrupt and all data was lost -- however, most of the time this happened on systems that were booting off the same XFS file system. This is not the case with me as I have a seperate drive for the OS (320Gb Seagate running a couple of EXT3 partitions).

What do you guys think...? Should I switch to XFS or perhaps some other file system for the raid array or should I just leave it as EXT3 and loose the 30Gb? Also, what about changing the reserved % for root on the EXT3 filing system. I have read that you can do this but I have no idea if this would be a good idea or not. Any help would be appreciated

If it's just a media server, put Solaris on it and use ZFS.
I'd say Soft raid is a bad idea anyway because no matter what FS you use if your sofware gets corrupt its going to write bad data.

I'd leave it on ext3.

Solaris hey? Hmm, i dont know anything about Solaris... what are the advantages for going that route over Linux (Ubuntu)?

I would stay stick with ext3 unless you ABSOLUTELY need the extra space. ext3 a very stable file system with many recovery tools available should something go belly up. That being said I've had good success with reiser3, reiser4 claims better performance but has not been tested as thoroughly. XFS hasn't been around for a long while so isn't as well tested either but claims nice performance.

As for Solaris, it's Sun's Unix equivalent. ZFS is their new big and bad(in a good way) filesystem. More info on it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zfs

man e2fstune

Those 5% set aside for root are not set in stone you know.

The main advantage of XFS, and why it is used in media servers, is that you can delete very large files MUCH faster than in ext3. I personally use XFS on my mythtv partition, and ext3 everywhere else.

klingens said:

man e2fstune

Those 5% set aside for root are not set in stone you know.

Click to expand...

QFT

If the partition is just for storing your media files I reckon you could get all of that 30GB back.

Especially deleiting the files is very slow on XFS for me. WHen I still used my 486 over samba with kernel 2.4, the samba connection timed out everytime I deleted a file bigger than ~400MB.: it took 10 or more seconds. Kernel 2.5 solved it tho

That's interesting. I can delete 10 gb files in a few seconds on my XFS partition, while it can take minutes on ext3. This was why I went with XFS in the first place.

Then again, I always used a 2.6.x kernel on that system.

Well I'm happy to report that after spending the best part of the weekend configuring / tweaking things on both my Ubuntu boxes, I finally managed to get everything working. I decided to go w/ XFS and so far its been good. The array is half full now so I should be good for a while. After I got everything transferred over I tried streaming video via Samba and got jerky playback out of mplayer. 3 hours later I figured out that it was a cache issue w/ mplayer and once I enabled / increased the cache everything worked smooth. Man, I've wanted to switch my machines over to linux for a good 3 - 4 years now and it definately feels great to finally get it done. Thanks for the help guys.

XFS will probably the best option.

ext2fs with it's slow delete/truncate can be an annoyance here. Obviously Reiserfs is unsuitable.