Filesystems
Extra features
Weigh up a range of other capabilities.
A lthough we undoubtedly value speed over pretty much everything else when looking at the merits of any particular filesystem, sometimes that isn’t enough to differentiate any one over the rest. In that situation, we need to take other things into consideration. For instance, you might be choosing a filesystem for a more complex setup, such as a RAID array or an LVM volume, in which case you need to investigate each filesystem’s more advanced features. On top of this advanced extras such as automatic checksums and snapshot options all help secure your files and provide additional security. Let’s take a closer look at our five contenders to find out whether they have anything else to offer.
Reiser5 8/10
About a year ago, Edward Shishkin – the sole Reiser5 developer – reported that he had stabilised the filesystem’s logical volume functionality. So, the real power of Reiser5 doesn’t lie in formatting a single plain drive partition. Instead, it’s found in enterprise-grade usage, where several storage devices are united in one logical device. The logical volume manager in Reiser5 supports an impressive feature known as Data Tiering, which involves dumping peaks of I/O load to a proxy device. The idea is to add a speedy drive to an existing array of slow drives and make the whole array perform quickly. As long as I/O peaks don’t last for too long, the Reiser5 volume balancer has enough time to flush the cache and make the fast device available for the next peak. The ability to balance data between parts of the volume and fast data migration make Reiser5 very promising.