[Nottingham] External Drive FS? [was kernel 2.6.27: INFO: task xxxx blocked for more than 120 seconds.]

[Martin Garton]

On Mon, 2008-11-10 at 20:03 +0000, Martin wrote:
> Christopher Joice wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-11-10 at 15:00 +0000, Jim Moore wrote:
> >> Right root cause as far as I can make out; it's down to the fact, 
> >> Martin, that you're using a journaling file system on external drives - 
> >> never a good idea 
> > Ok, so what *should* I use?
> 
> A UPS?!
> 
> More seriously, that is a very good question.
> 
> Opinions or hard data anyone?

No hard data, but a minor anecdotes to throw into the mix:

I have recovered perfectly numerous times form sudden power loss
(including at least once during lots of writes) to a usb2 external hard
drive using ext3.  I have also suffered losses a couple of times using
ext2.  I have never used any other filesystem type on such a drive.

Also, if using ext3, you might want to use "barrier=1" in the mount
options.  It might be the default these days anyway.  I don't know if
reiserfs support barriers.

-- 
Martin.