Is bit flipping on storage media really a valid concern? My understanding of signal storage media is that at the lowest levels there are significant amounts of ECC already in place to handle imperfections in the media itself. Sectors that are detected as deteriorating are remapped before the data can no longer be read--thus the source of the S.M.A.R.T. "grown defects" counter. For SSDs, maybe this concern is now raising its ugly head again?
If you want bleeding edge, you could try tux3. It has stronger semantics than pretty much any fs out there (always consistent, near perfect no-space detection and handling), scales both large and small (tiny even), and is also very fast (faster than ext4 and even tmpfs in some cases). It should be going into mainline kernel "any day now" (barring mostly politics). You could completely absolve yourself of any significant fragmentation concerns if you downloaded first to a temporary fs volume then moved the files whole to their final storage volume--that would yield a nearly contiguous allocation for them. IMO, ext4 is the safest fs choice in Linux land today. Btrfs is simply not ready yet. XFS while fairly mature still has some weird behaviors reported occasionally, and ZFS while feature-full--and for which may be your cup of tea--can be a little more effort to deal with. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
