[Gllug] Partition a 2 TB drive for storing films

[Nix]

On 6 Mar 2010, John Winters uttered the following:

> I've just bought a 2 TB Seagate USB drive (130 squids from Maplin) to
> store my film collection on, replacing an older 750G one.
>
> I was pleased to see that at last it didn't come formatted with one
> large FAT partition.  Instead it had one large NTFS partition, so that
> had to go.

:)

> Is there any reason for me not to just make one large ext3 partition?
> Is there anything else more suited to a large filesystem?

Even if you use -T largefile4, you will curse the day you chose to use ext3
the day it fscks for the first time. Natively-created ext4 filesystems
are much much faster, especially if built with -G 64 or something like that
(which also speeds up metadata-heavy writes, but you're not doing that
with this fs: still, the effect on fsck speeds is notable).

My 200Gb /usr (with 50Gb in it) fscks in about twenty seconds. Over USB
it'll be a good bit slower, but still enormously faster than ext3 was.

>                                                              Note that
> there will be a relatively small number of largish (2 to 4 gig) files on it.

Extents will lead to slightly less disk activity as reads happen, and
preallocation will possibly lead to a *lot* less fragmentation of those
files.
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug