[OpenAFS] Overview? Linux filesystem choices

[Andy Cobaugh]

I don't think anybody has mentioned the block level compression in ZFS yet. 
With simple lzjb compression (zfs set compression=on foo), our AFS home 
directories see ~1.75x compression. That's an extra 1-2TB of disk that we don't 
need to store. Of course that makes balancing vice partitions interesting when 
you can only see the compression ratio at the filesystem level and not the 
volume level.

Checksums are nice too. There's no longer a question of whether your storage 
hardware wrote what you wanted it to write. This can go a long way to helping 
to predict failures if you run zpool scrub on a regular basis (otherwise, zfs 
only detects checksum mismatches upon read, scrub checks the whole pool).

So, just to add us to the list, we're either ext3 on linux for small stuff 
(<10TB), and zfs on solaris for everything else. Will probably consider XFS in 
the future, however.

If you do use ext3, I find it helps sometimes to turn off atime. It might be 
interesting to see what other options, if any, other folks are using for ext3.

--andy