[rescue] Filesystem choice for fileserver?

[Michael-John Turner]

Hi all,

I'm looking at building a new home fileserver over the coming weeks and one
of the things I'm still a bit unsure about is choice of filesystem. I'm
looking at using 3x750GB drives for data storage, in a RAID5 configuration
(ie about 1.5TB usable). The server itself will probably be a Core2Quad
with 4/8GiB RAM. 

One slight fly in the ointment is that I'd like to use the server for some
virtualisation as well - my software choice there is VMware Server (I want
to share VMs with VMware Fusion on my MBP), which pretty much necessitates
the use of Linux.

Naturally, my first choice would be ZFS, but it's only stable on Solaris
(and maybe FreeBSD), neither of which are supported as VMware host
platforms.

My Linux filesystem of choice used to be reiserfs version 3, but that's
pretty much in maintenance only mode these days. I'm very keen on XFS, what
with its solid SGI heritage, but I've read a few horror stories of people
who've lost data using it. There's also JFS, which I have no experience
with and doesn't seem particularly popular, and ext3, which I'm not a fan
of because of it's semi-async nature.

Anyone got any thoughts on this? What's everyone using for their fileserver
needs these days?

-mj
-- 
Michael-John Turner 
mj at mjturner.net     | http://mjturner.net/