Recommendation for Filesystem on Larg(ish) LVM

Hey Guys,

Rolling out a new largish array that will be MDADM6 with 8 16TB drives - i intend to use LVM on top of this raid. The current filesystem i am migrating this from has 40TB in the same setup as above but with EXT4 - which i am familiar and comfortable with an never had any issues.

Is XFS going to offer me anything over using EXT4

The drive space will be a single LVG with 4 LVMs ranging from 45TB down to 10TB

My Home, root etc etc is all on a seperate drive that is straight EXT4

Thanks

Craig

It’s going to come down to your use case. I generally look at it like this (from experience in the enterprise):

  • If you plan on having large file sizes on average (ranging in hundreds of megabytes and on), XFS is generally more efficient.
  • If you plan on having a large I/O workload, EXT4 tends to do better than XFS in I/O operations.[1]
  • If you have low CPU resources, using EXT4 will be beneficial for you as XFS consumes double the CPU than EXT4 would for metadata.[1]

My opinion only: In cases of having large amount of large files, I usually make sure the volume is XFS. Other than that, ext4 is my standard go-to.


[1] The way to look at this is that if an application uses a single read/write thread with small files, EXT4 does extremely well. EXT4 will generally perform better on limited bandwidth. XFS on the other hand shines when dealing with multiple threads and larger files, with much higher bandwidth and IOPS.

Thanks for this - that leaves me in a bit of a quandry then !

40TB + is used for media files - mostly videos etc which are streamed and are typcially stored as single large mkv files of many gigabytes.

I will also host VM backups on this media and VM images (replicated) but not accessed Live.

The CPU is average - a Ryzen 5000 Series.

  • Think i will try XFS and see if the CPU copes OK

thanks

Craig

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