ZFS: 🙂
I wish the licensing would be Linux compatible
Overall solid but BTRFS has the advantage of being Linux native in the way it works. Right now I wouldn't use btrfs for a critical raid system but it is great for single disks.
As someone who uses btrfs mostly (sometimes ext4, but I don't really know why...), can someone explain the benefits of ZFS over the previous two I mentioned?
The two biggest benefits are that it's basically a finished implementation of btrfs (see data corruption in large pools and raid 5 and 6), as well as being able to encrypt and compress at the same time.
Plus, and I don't know if this is a ZFS-specific thing, being able to group disks into VDevs and not just into one big raid.
ZFS is more than just a filesystem, it's a fully-integrated disk management system which replaces mdadm, LVM, LUKS, nfsd, rsync, as well as the filesystem. It's great for NAS boxes and file servers, since you can give it a big pile o' disks, and it slices and dices, and offers simple commands to create whatever volumes you need.
This is the way
That surgeon general's warning sent me into a giggle fit.
Hot format. Invest invest INVEST
IDK what they mean by better ssd I/O performance, btrfs was the worst FS I tested for some heavy SSD workloads (like writing thousands of little pngs in short time, file searches, merging huge weights with some paging)…
The features are fantastic, especially for HDDs, but it’s an inherently high overhead FS.
ext4 was also bad. F2FS and XFS are great, and I've stuck with F2FS for now.
Really? I've found that btrfs is generally more performant than XFS
Yeah, it’s like night and day. btrfs and ext4 clog up and stall on the PNG workload, it’s why I switched in the first place.
This is on a PCIe ssd though. On an HDD or maybe a big SATA drive, features probably win out over the overhead.
What's the problem with btrfs really?
It is nice but it also feels like it is perpetually unfinished. Is there some major flaw in the design?
I’ve seen ZFS in production use on pools with hundreds of TBs, clustered together into clusters of many PBs. The people running that don’t even think about BTRFS, and certainly won’t actively consider it for anything.
- BTRFS once had data corruption bugs. ZFS also had that, but only in very specific edge cases. That case was taken very seriously, but basically, ZFS has a reputation for not fucking up your bits even close to BTRFS
- ZFS was built and tested for use on large pools from the beginning, by Sun engineers from back when Sun was fucking amazing and not a pile of Oracle managed garbage. BTRFS still doesn’t have stable RAID5/6.
- ZFS send/recv is amazing for remote replication of large filesystems.
- DRAID is kind o the only sane thing to do with todays disk sizes, speeds and pool sizes.
But those are ancillary reasons. I’ll quote the big reason from the archwiki:
The RAID 5 and RAID 6 modes of Btrfs are fatally flawed, and should not be used for "anything but testing with throw-away data”.
For economic reasons, you need erasure coding for bigger pools, either classic RAID5/6 or DRAID. BTRFS will either melt your data in RAID5/6 or not support DRAID at all.
The main one is how it handles corruption. It has actively been designed to do the exact opposite of what a sane filesystem should do and maximises downtime.
It shouldn't be that hard to patch it so that it works around failures. I'm not sure why that doesn't seem to be a config setting.
Still no built-in encryption support :(
I can't be the only one that reads BTFRS as butt farts
If you were, not anymore. That's what I'm calling it from now on.
Am I old if I read BTRFS as butterface?
I think your subconscious switched up the letters to induce the funny
Or the dyslexia
Maybe not butt farts, but butter for sure.
And here I thought it was "butt first".
The CoW nature of Btrfs means it's often slower than ext4 for common tasks, right? It also means more writes to your SSDs.
I've stuck to ext4 so far, as someone who doesn't really have a need for snapshotting.
Edit: I'm not an expert on file systems in the least, so do chime in if these assumptions are incorrect.
Friends don’t let friends use filesystem level deduplication.
Why?
It’s just too slow and memory consuming. Leave it for backup solutions like Borg.
I wish we could just get one good open, unified filesystem that all OS's support. It sucks that if I want a usb drive to function on both Android and Linux, I have to format it to FAT. That pos fs can't even store files over 4 gigs.
I normally prefer copyleft licenses, but this is one case something more permissive seems appropriate.
practically begging for someone to post the competing standards xkcd
Personally, I enjoy having multiple options and being able to choose what meets my needs best.
FAT(ty)
Notice the hard drive is a Southern Numeric branded Xavier Blue.
It's a random 3d model I found on the internet haha. The "Southern Numeric" got a chuckle out of me as well XD
Wtf lol
Who needs RAID when you have mergerfs
mergerfs in the kernel would be cool for better performance.
for those that don't know, it's a FUSE based filesystem, which is also cool, but can be slow at times.
Weirdly enough because of the way mergerfs does writes across multiple drives, the main issue that FUSE filesystems face performance wise (namely writing a bunch of small files and their metadata) actually gets pretty well mitigated.
How about lvmvdo
Oh thanks for this.
Wow! Didn’t know they had this back then. Very cool.
what's the advantage of raid 5&6 over something like raid 4&5 - it reads essentially the same to me - a parity redundancy.
6 is preferable over 5 because with today's disk sizes, swapping in a new drive and resilvering it (full disk write basically in terms of amount of data) takes so long that statistically you might just encounter a second failure during that, which for raid 5 would mean complete failure of the array.
Of course, that's just an uptime issue, since raid is not backup.
As someone who uses openSUSE, this is great I love it.
