Best Long-term Large Filesystem

I store all my Music CDs, Music, DVD Rips, etc on hard drives for quick access and long term storage. What file system should I use?

I use a bunch of drives glued together in an LVM so being able to grow and shrink would be nice, as well as efficient storage and quick access times. Compatibly is also nice (not having to install kernel drives is a plus).

So, what do you use and why?

From serverfault Paul Tarjan

• ZFS or XFS will do you just fine.

  Teddy : Some motivation, please.

  Chopper3 : What? that's worth d downvote FFS!, it's the answer to his question, the only other answer ignore the fact that he's using LVM, therefore Linux, but he doesn't get a downvote - jesus wept!

  Paul Tarjan : I currently use XFS but there is no shrink option which makes it difficult to remove bad drives by deleting content. Does ZFS have better utilities?
  From Chopper3

• Hey Paul,

  which Operating System do you prefer? If you not focused on a special one I suggest ZFS (OpenSolaris) as well. For Windows you have to go with NTFS. There are some projects porting ZFS technology to other Operating Systems but a native filesystem is always a more stable way.

  I use ZFS on a little "filer" with a minimal OpenSolaris installed. I will post a little tutorial as soon as my blog is finished. Maybe you step by but it will take me a few more days. ;-)

  Regards Chris

  Greg Askew : FreeNAS is another option for ZFS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeNAS

  Paul Tarjan : Does ZFS have online grow and shrink? Offline grow and shrink? Built in drives for Ubuntu?

  Wienczny : You can't shrink ZFS. Neither online nor offline. Ubuntu has no driver. If you want a Ubuntu supported filesystem you could hava a look at btrfs (which is not quite stable)...

  christianwolff : You can shrink ZFS Filesystems without a problem. By default all filesystems use the whole Zpool they're on without a Quota. What you can not do is shrink and grow the Zpool which is basically the pool of physical disks. An exception is a JBOD setup but there you can not shrink afaik. But with RAID-Z1 or RAID-Z2 (RAID-5 or RAID-6) set up you can't either grow and shrink. You have to set up a new Zpool and move the filesystem to the target Zpool. For more informations see the very good ZFS documentation on the Sun Homepage.

  womble : I see no mention of ZFS at all at http://sun.com/

  christianwolff : You can click on the front page on the OpenSolaris Button and get more information there or just search for ZFS to find interesting articles and documentation about ZFS. http://search.sun.com/main/index.jsp?qt=ZFS&charset=UTF-8
  From christianwolff

• I use ext3, because it's stable, well-known, very well supported, and is capable of online growth and offline shrinking. I've tried most of the exotics and typically found them a bit dangerous in the edge cases (bugs in XFS on ARM that regularly trashed filesystems was the most entertaining one).

  From womble