Ok, I just recently got a Terabyte HDD (ST31000340AS) and am wondering what filesystem to put on it (XFS if it is the best) and what paramaters I should pass to the mkfs command.

I've been running my workstation with /home as an xfs filesystem for the past few months. A couple of things I have noticed (no "scientific" data to back these up, just observances):

1) XFS seems much faster than ext3. I do some digital video processing on this machine and all things being equal hardware-wise, the tasks performed on xfs finish noticeably sooner.

2) XFS has issues with recovering from unexpected power-downs. I have had some unrecoverable files after ungraceful shutdowns that I didn't experience with ext3. A UPS most certainly helps in this regard, but my problem ended up being the power supply itself in both cases.

So, given the above, I keep my KM boxen on ext3 with the default (auto-install) settings. I haven't had any issues with that so far, even speed-wise. As to which options to pass to mkfs, that would highly depend on what you intend to use the disk for...

I intend to use the drive strictly for my multi-gigabyte recordings.

You're not giving much to go on here. Are you having issues with other filesystems? I record SD and HD to a separate SATA drive mounted to /myth/tv as ext3 on my backend, which my frontends happily play from.

I just recently bought a Seagate ST31000340AS SATA II drive, and a SATA II controller for my old TUSL2-C ASUS mobo that has 4 IDE HDDs and 2 PVR-350s that I use to record all of my shows. Typically half an hour takes 1 GB. I bought this drive to store all of my recordings on. I'm open to any filesystem if it will perform really good with these large files. If XFS is not good at recovering from power downs, then I'm willing to look into other options such as ReiserFS ext3 or something else. Whatever is best for this purpose on such a large drive.

EDIT: I've settled on JFS since it is the least processor intensive.

I recently did something similar but I was moving[edit: actually I was coping] /myth/music. After doing so, I was glad that I ran a diff only to discover that /myth/music1/.Xmas, which I had hidden after Christmas, had not been copied over. Additionally it showed me the link that I had previously created to /myth/video/.music2, which was on sda1, where I had offloaded files to relieve space on hda3.