Now, I don’t claim to be an expert on filesystems. That said, this time around I installed reiserfs on my root and home partitions, instead of ext3, at the recommendation of the Gentoo installation documentation.

I have been so impressed.

Whereas emerge sync used to take about 5-10 minutes to run with ext3, it now runs in about a minute. It flies!

I wish I knew more about the strengths and weaknesses of the various filesystems. Right now, it’s easy to say “I’ll never go back to ext3”, but I have to wonder if there is a time and place for it, over reiserfs.