I'm rebuilding my home server. It will have 2x80GB IDE drives (previously existing RAID1 array) and 4x250GB SATA300 drives set up as RAID5.

On top the RAID arrays I am going to run LVM. I like the flexibility that LVM affords, and I really like the snapshot feature which will be useful for server virtualisation.

On top of that though... which filesystem? Obviously it has to be journalling. The CPU is going to be busy enough rebuilding arrays anyway. I don't want to wait hours for filesystem checks too! The old ext2 on RAID1 took long enough to fsck a 60GB partition. I hate to think how long a 720GB would take in addition.

Ext3 would be the obvious solution. But is it the best? Other options would be Reiser, XFS and JFS. I'm also open to running different filesytems on different logical volumes to match performance to intended use.

The large RAID5 array is going to be /home. Aside from typical flotsam and jetsom that ends up in /home, there will be lots of large media files there - mp3s and mpegs from my replaytvs. Everything else will be on the RAID1 array - /, /boot, /usr, /swap, /var, /tmp.