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Hey guys I am looking to setup a new HDD (mechanical) for file system storage only. I may end up using it to save VirtualBox VM's/snapshots. But other than that, it will be strictly for file storage (music, video, pictures, etc).

I have been debating what filesystem to use. I used to use ext2 pretty much exclusively for this purpose and can't remember ever having a problem. It seems the way to go today is ext4 - but does the journal help me in my situation? Or should I just disable it entirely? There will be NO 'OS' running on the drive. Is there much of an advantage to using journal on a storage only drive? Or is it creating a lot of overhead?

Or if anyone has a different recommendation - I would love to hear it. Not wanting to use XFS,ZFS, etc.

Thanks everyone!

Veronica
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  • if it is an external drive, ntfs will let drive be read by windows and linux – ravery Jun 27 '17 at 21:04
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    I have no need for windows – Veronica Jun 27 '17 at 21:04
  • The journal on ext4 would help recover data if, for example, the computer you plugged the drive into suffered an unexpected power outage while writing to the disk. However, if you have sensitive data to the drive, it may end up in the journal without an easy way to clean it out. – rlee827 Jun 27 '17 at 21:13
  • Ok thank you for your advice. Seeing as it's only used for things like pictures/videos, I think I can live without the journal. If the power got interrupted during a transfer like you said - I would end up re-transferring the whole file anyways (regardless of whether I have a journal - I wouldn't trust that it isn't corrupted).

    Or do you mean - if the power was killed during a transfer - the entire HDD could end up corrupt due to there being no journal? I am under the impression if that happened, only the file(s) in transfer would be affected (not the files already residing on the disk?)

     – Veronica Jun 27 '17 at 22:40

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I'm going to assume that your question is ( and it isn't clearly stated so you should edit that ) whether ext4 on a bulk storage volume, and more specifically the journal feature provides a benefit over either ext2 or ext4 but without the journal.

The benefit of the journal specifically is that you don't have to run e2fsck on the volume to try and recover it after an unclean unmount or shutdown ( i.e. sudden powe r failure ). That is a pretty good reason to use it in general. ext4 also introduces several other features that make it a much better filesystem than ext2, even if you otherwise format it for ext4, then disable the journal ( with tune2fs ). In particular there is the extents feature that allows the filesystem to list large ranges of blocks that belong to a file as a group rather than having to allocate many, many indirect, double indirect, and triple indirect blocks to list every single one.

psusi
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  • Yes you are very correct about the specifics to my question. I appreciate you replying very much. I have certainly settled on using ext4 but regarding the journal, I need clarification on one thing... If the journal is disabled and say a sudden power failure took place... Are we talking about corrupting the whole drive, or only the files that were being written at the time? I've had a few outages with ext2 but have never noticed any corrupted files (yet lol). Pretty sure the PC wasn't in use when it happened so no writing was taking place. Thanks a million! – Veronica Jun 29 '17 at 04:34
  • @Veronica, generally speaking you aren't going to lose any more data than you would with the journal. You just have to run fsck to repair the volume, and that can take a while, especially on a larger disk. Disabling it also won't gain you anything, so you may as well not worry about it. – psusi Jun 29 '17 at 18:57