What is the best filesystem for a USB storage drive?

[Adam Franco]

Hello All,

Back in July I got my plug set up as a file-server with a large (1TB) USB hard drive formatted with HFS+ so that I could maintain all of my unix file-permissions while easily mounting it on my Mac if needed. (http://plugcomputer.org/plugforum/index.php?topic=529.0)

Recently I've been noticing I/O errors on the plug. I believe the filesystem is corrupted in a way that allows reading, but not fixing on the Mac, but results in continual I/O errors on the plug. I've now purchased a second USB drive to allow me to mirror them and am faced with the decision as to what filesystem would be the best to use on the drive connected to the plug. I'm not booting off of the USB drive, so root-filesystem restrictions aren't an issue. I've given up on HFS+ as well due to the recent non-fixable corruption issues.

Does anyone have any advice as to what would be the most reliable filesystem to use in this situation? EXT2, EXT3, something else? Since I don't have a UPS, my biggest concern is corruption occurring due to sudden power failure. Are any filesystems more resistant to corruption in that situation?

Thanks for any advice!
Adam

[DamonHD]

I'm using ext3 with barrier=1,data=ordered for maximum crash safety, plus noatime and commit=600 to minimise unnecessary wear.

http://www.earth.org.uk/note-on-SheevaPlug-setup.html#storage

Plus, on my USB Flash thumbdrive I laid out the filesystem cylinders to line up with Flash block boundaries which should help improve performance and reduce wear even more following Theodore Ts'o...

No filesystem is completely immune to corruption on power-off, but mine seems to have survived a good few unplanned abrupt system shutoffs.

BTRFS (or ZFS) that checksum their data will be the next significant improvement so far as I can tell.

Rgds

Damon

[Adam Franco]

Thanks! So far its working well.