I’ve used most of the different filesystems in Linux. My most recent favorite has been JFS, but things like starvation with find have really been annoying me lately. To summarize, here is my experience with filesystems:

• ext2: very slow, moderately unreliable
• ext3: somewhat slow but reliable
• reiserfs: fast, unreliable (cross-linked data after crash issues)
• jfs: usually fast, somewhat unreliable (similar issues after crash, plus weird charset issues)

The one major Linux FS not in that list is XFS. So I decided to give it a whirl, switching my 40GB /home on one machine to XFS. So far, it’s been good.

There are two articles at IBM developerworks about XFS that were useful. There’s also a useful filesystems comparison from Novell.