> reiserfs has barriers turned on by default - which makes it a bit slower but a > lot safer for data. ext3 has them turned off by default - ext3 devs don't care > about data - only speed. You turn on barriers, performance goes down by 30%. I read an article about that, and if I recall correctly the assumption was that the likelihood of data loss occurring due to the barriers issue was negligible. I have no expertise to decide on that matter, but the fact that pretty much every linux distribution chooses ext3 by default suggests it is the safest (at least for simple desktop/laptop usage), no?
Somewhat offtopic: What do you suggest for me? I care about data safety, but am too lazy to make frequent backups, so filesystem robustness and availability of data recovery tools is pretty important; and as I said before, the only performance problem with my computer that I think may be related to filesystem is boot time and launching heavy programs not in cache; keep in mind my root partition is only 3,8 GB used and 93% free - maybe in this condition the filesystem is not stressed and only the actual HD speed matters? Valerie Henson from VAH Consulting says that every file system goes fast with: * O(1000) files per directory * File size a few KB to a few GB * Read-mostly access * Infrequent file creation/deletion * Sequential file read/write patterns * Shallow directory depth (< 10 levels) * Total file system size O(100 GB)
