What filesystems do you recommend for very large block devices?
The filesystem you choose will depend on how you want to use the storage. Here are some generalizations that may serve as a starting point. There are two major classes of filesystems: cluster filesystems and traditional filesystems. Cluster filesystems are more complex and support simultaneous access from multiple independent computers to a single filesystem stored on a shared block device. Traditional filesystems are only mounted by one host at a time. Some traditional filesystems that scale to sizes larger than those supported by ext3 include the following journalling filesystems. XFS, developed at SGI, specializes in high throughput to large files. Reiserfs, an often experimental filesystem can perform well with many small files. JFS, developed at IBM, is a general purpose filesystem.
