[svlug] File system choice.

[James Sparenberg]

All,

  As of today.  My prediction that if they didn't let me gracefully 
re-build our Unix file server, it would itself give me permission to do 
it ungracefully came true.  The kernel on the system paniced and it 
died a very ungraceful death.  (Thank goodness for Freesbie.)   

   So now I get to move the array from a very badly treated FreeBSD to a 
Linux box that no one but a few trusted souls can touch.  With a full 
wipe and restore from tape of the poorly partitioned array (what seemed 
like a lot of space for some things 3 years ago sure doesn't cut it 
now.)  

  16 x 300G drives 4.8TB of raw disk space.  I want to put on it, a file 
system that gives me these things.  

  1.  High fault protection (journaled)   
  2.  Decent speed reading and writing, about 20G a day gets added and 
deleted. on average (different files).
  3.  Decent speed when searching the array (find is used for many of 
our maintenance tools).  
  4.  Maximum space usage.  Files average in the 1 - 10mb range per 
individual file.  
  5.  Obviously I'll be using such switches as noatime etc. where 
available, to mount them.

I can do anything RHEL 5 will support natively, so if you have any 
thoughts I'd like to hear what many of you have to say about your 
experience/preferences.  Thanks in advance.

James