Choosing a filesystem
Three sensible answers, each with a clear job. Pick on what the machine does, not on what is newest.
ext4 — the default that is hard to regret
Mature, fast enough for almost everything, understood by every tool and every recovery guide ever written. If you have no specific reason to choose something else, this is the right answer and nobody will ever criticise you for it.
XFS — large files and parallel writes
Handles very large filesystems and many concurrent writers well, which is why it is the default on the enterprise distributions. Good for media, backups and big databases. Note that it cannot be shrunk, only grown — plan the layout once.
ZFS — when integrity matters most
Checksums on everything, snapshots that cost nothing, transparent compression and built-in RAID. For a storage box or a virtualisation host it is excellent, and the snapshots make backups far easier.
The cost is memory: give it several gigabytes before you start, more with deduplication, which you probably should not turn on at all. And it does not like sitting on top of a hardware RAID controller — give it the raw disks.
A practical layout
Separate your data from the operating system. A full log directory should never be able to fill the partition your database writes to, and a reinstall is much less frightening when the data lives on its own filesystem.
Tell us the layout you want when you order and the machine arrives that way. That saves you a reinstall on day one.
Still stuck? Mail support@novogara.com — an engineer answers, at any hour. Back to the knowledge base