[Wylug-help] XFS or EXT3 ?

[Nick R]

Hi all.

I have been lurking for a while and this is my first mail to wylug, so
firstly a hello to everyone. I have been using Linux for 6 months,
currently using a little known distro called Caos which my friend
Martyn introduced me to. I am also playing with Debian on a virtual
machine at work, which I am really liking). I used Slackware years ago
when I was at University at Newcastle do Computer Science and used
mainly as a Quake game server :). I am a vb/asp.net developer by trade
for Bradford PCT  NHS and would love to move into a Linux/PHP job at
some point as I slowly growing weary of Microsoft and more and more
enjoying open-source.

I have been running XFS on my Laptop and PC for 6 months or so.
The only problem I have suffered was my when pc rendered unbootable by
some corrupt ram causing mass data corruption.

I have recently read that there is a problem with XFS on power
failures (I have had a couple of power cuts which did'nt cause a
problem).

The issue is highlighted on this page -
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Filesystems/reiserfs.htm .     Note this is
not related to XFS zeroing files that are still open on an unclean
shutdown.

What I am wondering is this a serious issue (enough for me to abandon
using XFS) ?
My favoured alternative is EXT3 - I have read conflicting information
that says EXT3 is better in a powercut than XFS and vice-versa.
I personally like the features of XFS - extent based, large write
cache - in theory, but in reality with general desktop home server use
are these features of noticeable benefit ?

I would consider Reiser, but not confident with the maturity/stability
of project at the moment.

Of course the REAL answer is to buy a UPS, which I may well do, but I
thought this would be useful subject to discuss :)

Thanks Nick.