Are these issues really unique to Ext3? [LWN.net]

Are these issues really unique to Ext3?

Posted Aug 31, 2009 23:22 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)
Parent article: Ext3 and RAID: silent data killers?

I can't imagine that these issues (especially the flash-based disk problems Pavel experienced) are unique to Ext3. Microsoft's NTFS and Mac OS X's HFS+ are both journaling file systems that perform transactional commits, don't they?

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Are these issues really unique to Ext3?

Posted Sep 2, 2009 7:01 UTC (Wed) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

See http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/iron-sosp05.pdf for a good paper on how hard disks fail, including partial failures, and the failure/recovery behaviour of ext3, reiserfs, JFS and NTFS. Also talks about ixt3, an ext3 variant by the authors that's intended to have a stronger and more consistent failure/recovery model. This includes journal and data block checksums.

There was a 'journal checksum patch' for ext3 by the authors, I think, but I can't track it down.

Not sure about NTFS, but HFS+ does seem to have journal checksums - see http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn/tn115...