File System Benefits
File System Benefits
Potentialy dumb question here, is there any benefit to using btrfs on a non system disk? I'm fairly ignorant on file systems, asfaik btrfs largest benefit is snapshotting, not sure of anyothers.
The main benefits to BTRFS over something like ext4 tends to be considered as; the subvolume support - which is what's used for snapshotting, the granluar quotas, reflinks, transparent compression, and the fact that basically all filesystem operations can be performed online.
I'm personally running BTRFS in a couple of places; NAS, laptop, and desktops. Mainly for the support to do things like snapshots and subvolumes, but I also make heavy use of both reflinks and compression, and I've also made use of online filesystem actions quite a few times.
If you have steam, btrfs compression will dramatically shrink the size of an installed game with zero performance impact. In some cases, the disk read speed even increases.
Using btrfs makes a lot if sense on a NAS, because it allows you to make snapshots in a nice way. It also has some features that give your data better odds of survival if something goes wrong.
It's very useful to have on a desktop too. If you break something or have an issue with an update, you can restore a snapshot and be back up and running in less than a minute.
This was specifically about non system disk though
It certainly is very useful there as well. Depending on the kind of system you have and how you use it, this feature may be absolutely crucial or simply nice to have. If you like to tinker a lot, it’s probably crucial.
non system disk
That really depends on what you mean by that? Is it an internal or external drive, what sort of drive is it (HDD, SSD etc), and what are you going to use it for, and are you planning to share the drive with other operating systems?
Because while btrfs is nice in general, you may find other filesystems more suitable, depending on your usage requirements.
I like BTRFS's checksumming abilities and compression the most. BTRFS will keep track of every block of data's checksum, and when you run a
scrubit will detect bitrot. If you want to heal the bitrot you'll need to run e.g. RAID1. RAID5/6 are not stable so don't use those. ZSTD:1 compression is basically free storage with no downside, and can massively speed up file operations if you're using spinning rust.Personally I run BTRFS on any disk that only needs a single drive, like OS disk or games drive. My NAS runs a ZFS array for any mass storage, which includes basically the same feature set as BTRFS, except RAID actually works and everything is a tiny bit better. A ZFS NAS isn't very good unless you pump a decent amount of money into it to get it going, so if you're on a tight budget I'd recommend MergerFS+SnapRAID backed by BTRFS disks, which is very similar to Unraid in terms of storage paradigm except free.
I usually just stick to the standard file system to any OS.
So for Linux that would be ext4.
For external drives i use either FAT32 (the ol' reliable) or exFAT (the fastest for dealing with large files when you set the max allocation unit size AKA 32MB).
So for Linux that would be ext4.
It's worth noting that the default file system varies by distro - there is no 'Linux' default. For example, RHEL et al use XFS as the default.
I'd say it's essential on a SMR drive
But don't use those, they're vastly inferior.