Filesystems in 7.0 & reliability

[Norberto Meijome]

Hi everyone,
I've been using 7 for a couple of weeks now on my work laptop (kickstarted by cooling issues while in 6.2, which seem to have largely gone in 7).

I have a 100GB SATA drive in a Thinkpad Z60m with

CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 2.00GHz (1995.02-MHz 686-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x6d8  Stepping = 8
  Features=0xafe9fbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,CLFLUSH,DTS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,TM,PBE>
  Features2=0x180<EST,TM2>
real memory  = 1609433088 (1534 MB)
avail memory = 1567780864 (1495 MB)

I installed 7 on a normal UFS disk, but then migrated to having /usr in a UFS journaled partition , with a 1.5 GB journal on ad0s1h .  I didn't have any issue that I could directly relate to it. I had more hangs than now (i reverted back to plain UFS due to too many lock ups). The lock ups didnt leave any message or error anywhere - it seemed as if the disk subsystem stopped accepting commands (or was waiting on something ...) - anything in memory would work just fine, but as soon as disk access was needed, it 'd stall.

Something else i also noticed is that, after every crash, I couldn't just reboot and use my computer just fine, as I would have expected - maybe I'm wrong here.
I had to go into single user mode, and run a fsck /dev/ad0s1f.journal . this takes about 4 minutes. Hardly any errors were ever found  (as opposed to my non-journal partitions, which had files de-referenced ,etc.) So I suppose, in that regards, gjournal worked great.... but is the fsck needed??

I am also very interested in what zfs has to offer. How reliable is it? I am looking into using it both on my laptop, and as a filesystem for some large storage , possibly.

thanks for any ideas, comments, pointers :)

B
_________________________
{Beto|Norberto|Numard} Meijome

"Time exists so everything doesn't happen at once"
   Albert Einstein

I speak for myself, not my employer. Contents may be hot. Slippery when wet. Reading disclaimers makes you go blind. Writing them is worse. You have been Warned.