On Tue, 6 Nov 2012, Andrew Worsley <amworsley@gmail.com> wrote:
I have a modest root/usr partitions but the larger other partitions only used for recording TV take 30+ minutes to do the occasional fsck and that always is demanded sometimes very inconveniently on a reboot.
If you have an Ext* filesystem that is used for storing large files then you should make it Ext4 (which has some optimisations for fsck on unallocated space) and you should have a number of Inodes that is a good match for the number of files.
But there are other filesystems that offer advantages. XFS has traditionally been one of the best options for large files and generally needs no fsck. BTRFS is designed to never need a fsck and in terms of practically never needing a fsck should be better than XFS. ZFS is good, but maybe not for a little PVR.
Finally there's nothing stopping you from just increasing the amount of time between fsck runs. If a system is running 24*7 then it probably won't need a fsck every year.
Is a routine fsck on ext* filesystems still recommended, or just done because "that's the way we've always done it"? James