undefined | Better HN

0 pointsmbreese12y ago0 comments

I'm one of those people who had to deal with an XFS corruption about ten years ago, and the recovery process was messy - to say the least. At least with ext4, the recovery is easier to manage.

I'm still scarred by it.

This actually makes me happier with my decision to use FreeBSD and ZFS for a recent file server. I'll still use RHEL/CentOS for client nodes, but they'll all be using the ZFS export for storage.

0 comments

4 comments · 3 top-level

rodgerd12y ago· 1 in thread

Eight years ago Joyent suffered high-profile, irretrievable data corruption with ZFS. By your own metric I'm surprised you're using that.

mbreeseOP12y ago

Of course I'm going to have a bad taste in my mouth for XFS. Because it happened to me. At the time is was particularly frustrating because XFS was claimed to be very stable and should be used over ext3(? I don't remember if ext4 was out yet). Our group ended up moving all of those machines over to ext3/4 and we were quite happy with the results.

I remember when Joyent had their problem, and it made me hedge on ZFS for quite a while as well. Some time working with both Solaris and FreeBSD implementations in production was enough to change my mind.

I'm sure that XFS now-a-days is much more stable - Redhat wouldn't make it the default filesystem if it wasn't. Just because I had a bad experience with it many years ago doesn't mean that I won't use it, but I will evaluate if I need to.

But, I honestly wonder how much longer it will be the default with Btrfs coming along quickly.

4ad12y ago

10 years ago XFS on Linux was nowhere near as reliable as XFS on IRIX, plus it was missing tools that were available in IRIX.

I haven't used it since, but I would expect RedHat to have invested in correcting these problems over the years (I hope I'm not expecting too much).

Of course your point about ZFS still stands.

Florin_Andrei12y ago

I had the same experience over 10 years ago - and I was actually at SGI back then.

But that was then. This is now. I'm curious how things have changed meanwhile. I'm going to give this thing a spin.

I also remember the massive performance and effortless delivery of XFS under concurrent access, while using large files. That was fantastic. I would expect that's still the case now.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse