Zfs vs btrfs reddit. By peterg23 January 11 in Lounge.
Zfs vs btrfs reddit I do use zfs on my cache drives, because every night i do snapshots and replication to the 1 zfs drive in my array, which is then also protected by parity. 0. Making matters worse, ZFS also is slower than other RAID implementations (due to it's rich feature set. Remember that just like md, though, bcache isn't aware of btrfs: dm_cache or bcache can add a cache on a SSD to increase speed of slower spindles. There's a ton of information on both file systems - ZFS and BTRFS. If you want to store large amounts of data on many disks ZFS is what you want. practicalzfs. Don't get me wrong. I'd add one more: Power-out / sudden reboot resiliency: because btrfs and zfs are copy-on-write filesystems (write operations are atomic: either they're 100% completed or they're cancelled), you don't have to worry about data corruption in the event of a sudden loss of power or system crash. This subreddit has gone Restricted and reference-only as part of a mass protest against Reddit's recent API changes, which break third-party apps and moderation tools. I'm currently using BTRFS but I really don't use snapshots or any other feature that BTRFS provides but Ext4 doesn't. I think I'm actually the most vocal anti-zfs person on this forum. The only real advantages BTRFS has are faster creation of timeshift snapshots and a slight performance increase that you will barely notice on a fast SSD. I'm going to reinstall Artix and I want to make the right choice. performance is great, efficiency is great, ease of use is great, expandability is great. There is no need for battery backed controllers with ZFS or BTRFS. ZFS manual installation is difficult. Which can help in replication, which would be faster compare to rsync. From that experience I would not let zfs (and neither btrfs) get access to physical disks. There have been no serious data loss issues in recent years. Linux vs. Reiserfs currently has no corporate backing it. GPL stuff). Hey fellow GNU/Linux enthusiasts, I'd like to know your opinions about using Ext4 vs BTRFS. Zfs fans will try to push that, but without a pool (giving up the array), zfs loses a lot of it's values imo while making things more complex. But what scares me towards btrfs is that Synology's market presence seems far greater than QNap's. ZFS is great but heavy/complex, and lack of block pointer rewrite can be painful. After much reading on ReFS, Btrfs, & ZFS, I've decided to run all 3 馃し鈾傦笍(Did the same with Seagate vs. But what scares me towards btrfs is May 21, 2022 路 Therefore, most of what I've read (and can comprehend via my totally non-Linux newbie brain) says ZFS offers substantially better protection than btrfs. Unix, etc. Performance is important, but if they are off by 10-20% - we can bear with it, more important thing for us will be stability and snapshot feature. Thanks everyone who voted here https://www. I would avoid the B+M+S option since it's more moving parts to manage. I use md for RAID and LVM on top for flexibility and zfs on a logical volume that can be expanded if needed. I have had issues with btrfs send/receive. BtrFS looked promising, but last I checked it still couldn't be trusted in RAID modes. Maybe. I used this for video editing or other data. ZFS is older and built for enterprise grade arrays and in that use case it outshines Btrfs. ZFS has more features than BTRFS. So I could have both ZFS and This needs to be upvoted. What are the things that might make BtrFS better than ZFS? btrfs-raid1 - put a random pool of mismatched disks together, do distributed block-level redundancy. I don't want to but it has performance, reliability with zfs and doesn't hurt that it's free. I'm currently looking to tinker with Nixos on the side. I'm currently in process of long-term testing it; bringing the offlined disk online again resilvers (usually in under a minute) to refresh the backup. Zfs just makes good use of it Been using zfs for many years, before it was officially supported in unraid. ZFS does have issues working nicely with docker I ran into this as well. It's more than likely not staying like this. Sep 22, 2023 路 Therefore, most of what I've read (and can comprehend via my totally non-Linux newbie brain) says ZFS offers substantially better protection than btrfs. With btrfs, you can't really refer to an array separately from its member disks: "mount /dev/sda" will mount an entire btrfs array which includes /dev/sda, and so forth. However, zfs is the only fs that once failed on me without a hardware reason and I had it running on raw disks. They are not the same. Zfs eats more memory if using deduplication Zfs has encryption / btrfs relies on luks. I'm about to upgrade all the disks in my NAS with Seagate Exos and I though I should look into ZFS. The biggest thing to wrap your head around is that zfs has its own namespace separate from the system mount hierarchy. Never had any issues with zfs, but servers tend to be more reliable/stable. ) Normally to get these data integrity guarantees you need to control both the filesystem and volume management layers (as errors could pop up affecting For Btrfs, if they could clean up the bugs in the early days it could attract more users. Please share your experience on Linux ZFS vs BTRFS Yes, I used the installer and choose btrfs; you can setup raid to if you have multiple drives. Two EndeavourOS (Linux Kernel 5. BTRFS on Unraid - Reddit Discussion. You get btrfs corruption identification features but not the correction piece of it, basic raid like features but not the speed. Difficult to enter mainstream. Many topologies, some over 100TB, some 6x NVMe. I use the latter method currently, BTRFS Software RAID, and it works perfectly for me. Not a ton of bells and whistles, but they Just Work. For most uses I still use ext4. Fourthly, ZFS does not need tons of RAM, unless you're using deduplication, or a large L2ARC filled to If those are consumer class drives, ZFS can wreck them in pretty short order. I imagine the majority of users will keep their array as xfs due to the ease of adding additional drives vs zfs. g. What concerns me is reports that its heavier on ssd's due to all the extra metadata tracking etc. Personally I run btrfs on all my Linux devices, some of them with half-decade old installations of Arch and they've all performed admirably. We are considering between Linux ZFS and Btrfs. Btrfs vs ZFS So I am looking to make a VM pool out of some SATA SSDs. Updating Linux Kernel often broke ZFS. ZFS features are hard to beat. But when it comes to multi-disk deployments with redundancy, I just can't see any useful quality to BTRFS over mdraid or ZFS. The HDDs are in an external enclosure connected via USB and the SSD is SATA. f you're using ZFS with redundant storage, this same scheme allows the filesystem to choose between two or more redundant copies of the data when repairing the filesystem. com with the ZFS community as well. 0-rc. Without new revolution, it stays where it is. Btrfs is always faster than ext4 when used with the nodatacow mount option. Oct 29, 2024 路 In the future version of Unraid 7, is there an advantage of having single ZFS drive/pool in the Unraid Array versus BTRFS (e. a large professional setup like in a data center with funding I'd go for zfs. lose more than 1 it's and it's toast) while using exponentially more space. All my servers and VMs, except the NAS are on xfs. I think most Unraid users are switching from btrfs to zfs for their cache pools due to the increased stability/performance and the fact that you can utilize parity raid whereas btrfs only officially supported raid 0 and raid 1. I am aware of the warning of the btrfs developers and used for the metadata a raid1c3. Unless you're doing something crazy, ext4 or btrfs would both be fine. I've never had an issue with either, and currently run btrfs + luks. but in general volume management is customarily at the end of the storage, not at the beginning. And that RAID has been around for forever so people are familiar with it. Forget btrfs. I was thinking to try to use the SDD as a cache with bcache or ZFS's L2ARC, and the HDDs in RAID1 (currently they are just a JBOD). reddit. ext4 can claim historical stability, while the consumer advantage of btrfs is snapshots (the ease of subvolumes is nice too, rather than having to partition). I also have a 4x disk zfs pool of 12TB drives that gives me SSD type speeds but with large drives. ZFS has snapshots capability built into the filesystem. btrfs has proven to be a mess and as I mentioned, it is already very much obsolete. But as u/ewwhite mentioned, a file system is not as important as a good backup. This is an issue for those like me who have older laptops e. In general, Proxmox (via the installer) will do either ext4/xfs on LVM on either HW or linux md raid, or zfs. ZFS ZFS has multi device support for doing raid, ext4 does not. just like XFS, but using ZFS or BTRFS). But unused ram = wasted ram. That said, Btrfs is the trickiest to learn and requires some cron jobs to be manually set up for long term health. ZFS also requires an insane amount of resources in comparison with XFS. Here's a breakdown of my experience with each filesystem: Unraid 7. We need a file-system that has snapshot feature on linux for our production use. Few issues I had was all my fault learning. Doing on-disk deduplication (like using duperemove or bees) is hypothetically alright for an archive disk, but a very bad idea for an active volume; deletion and rebalance performance takes a huge dive when you have hundreds or thousands of shared extents. With special metadata devices you will also have the performance advantage. Over the years i learnt to go with these two rules to save ME some headaches: 1. I know in the past Btrfs in its infancy had some issues. In terms of space saving, borg is the all time winner. That however would disable a lot of the Btrfs features. The rest of the array drives are xfs. We got BTRFS in 2009 but was a combination of too weird and full of footguns, meaning you either became a BTRFS person or decided filesystems should not be exciting and ZFS is better used in other POOLs and then if you wish to backup ZFS snapshots you could use ZFS SEND to a single ZFS disk in the ARRAY. ZFS snapshots vs ext4/xfs on LVM. Raid1 and 10 are stable with btrfs. RAID 1. BTRFS on Unraid - Reddit Discussion ZFS vs. Totally agree. e. For my file servers data volumes I use btrfs. Starting a 4 disks this becomes worse than a normal RAID 6 or We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us. com/r/unRAID/comments/1hsiito/which_one_fs_do_you_prefer_for_cache_pool/ Sep 22, 2023 路 I highly recommend ZFS over BTRFS, ZFS has momentum and community and has proven it works great for almost two decades. Both options are default, only I disabled the compression of ZFS. ext4/xfs is only used for the Proxmox filesystem, not VM storage (but this does include ISOs and local backups). How do they compare today and is ZFS still the better choice? During my vacation, I spent some time experimenting with ZFS and BTRFS on Unraid. Both are amazing - ZFS is rock solid and used in huge configurations and BTRFS is pretty amazing as well, it is used by Facebook and they said that the filesystem helped them to find and report bugs to HDD manufacturers. ZFS was released in 2006, but deliberately licenced to keep it out of Linux (and Oracle curiously would rather be a heavy investor in btrfs than just change the ZFS licence). That also is also not that safe as ZFS but the opportunity for different drive sizes is more important for me (I would not do it at Depends on the application. But I ate too much btrfs is also slower in some benchmarks but I very much doubt thats visible in normal use. I had to manually reimport dkms and the volumes every time a new kernel was installed. Ive heard that RAID cards have had issues finding errors and have issues with failing after time. As an alternative on supported architectures(in other words not A I setup two VMs on the same partition in my NVMe SSD. Gets around the docker-zfs compatibility and gives me ZFS backing. (Obviously ZFS has a host of other handy features, but Synology has the handy feature of SHR. But mergerfs seems to work pretty well, - also with mixed format drives. btrfs is included in all kernels / Zfs is not. It seems like zfs on TrueNAS might be the way to go. Yes, ext4 is so focus on stability, but it lacks scalability. For immediate help and problem solving, please join us at https://discourse. Snapshots and self-healing are the top reasons for me to use zfs or btrfs over ext4 ZFS so far has been a pain in debian. Reply to this topic; E. It's a comparison of native ZFS encryption with BTRFS on an encrypted LUKS partition. For cache, I always suggest to run 2 disks in raid1, and keep it to btrfs for now myself (years of testing vs new half implemented tech with zfs). ) Keep away from btrfs and zfs, unless you are building storage solutions. Now I am migrating my data to a raid6 btrfs, because I want to use different drive sizes and do not want to waste drive space. Perhaps that's to be expected as Synology's a US-based brand. WD & Windows vs. I did the same comparison on Ubuntu 19. By peterg23 January 11 in Lounge. Trying to determine if I go with the rock-solid ZFS or mess with Btrfs. I've heard that ZFS requires a ton of memory how. Btrfs can be expanded with different size drives, and ZFS requires a new zvol consisting of the same amount of drives, I. I use btrfs on all kind of workstations and zfs on servers (because I don't trust any RAID level with btrfs). I understand if I use zfs/btrfs i will miss out on any data redundancy features but maybe pick up some added features like better consistency, snapshots, ect or should I just stick with ext4. true. The ZFS community is much larger in comparison, but the majority of users are inexperienced. 18) were installed, one uses ZFS and other uses BTRFS. zfs already implements all of btrfs' features (and more) and has proven stable. If the ram bothers you, lower the ARC size. Jan 11, 2025 路 ZFS vs. In terms of data loss, btrfs has been pretty reliable for a while now. Raid 5 vs ZFS vs large single drive I'm a bit new to this, and am building a small home server to learn more about servers, and what I would want to do with one if I decide to build a proper one. BTRFS installation is available in many Linux OS with GUI installer. I used to use ZFS above all else but it had some challenges. The last one is not in use for now. cpu: Intel 12100, 32GB DDR4. This video is not correct. 10, but both filesystems used an encrypted LUKS partition, they both were working with the speed of my SATA interface. Never lost all my data. What I don't want though is decreased storage performance. On top of that, ZFS uses a sophisticated checksumming scheme that allows the filesystem to detect miswritten or corrupted data. So I'd like to hear some of your opinions. Actually, Btrfs might have the upper hand there even, if zstd filesystem compression is used. Ext4 and XFS are both great for "I need a filesystem, to store files, on this drive". ZFS ain't bad, but this whole btrfs data loss myth needs to stop. Using this with a multi-device btrfs with mirroring or RAID5/6 would be inefficient, as the (write-trough) cache would not be aware of identical extends to be put on different disks and it doesn't make much sense to have them twice in the cache. doesn't need oodles of RAM the way ZFS does. Regarding community: my personal experience is, BTRFS community is smaller, but more prosumers and experts are willing to help. buying used laptops with older ssd vs a new one. And that BTRFS is better for certain features it has on top if ZFS features. I use ZFS, Btrfs, and ext4. ZFS (and BTRFS) has horrible write amplification in VM workloads, you will see people whine about SSDs dying left and right. Memory shortage can be a real thing but I contributed in my case I think. ) TL, DR: All 3 major next gen CoW file systems have their advantages and drawbacks, and I figure integrating them into my workflow is the only way to fairly evaluate them see how they work for myself. A good summary. My server has 32GB of memory. The most famous problem with Btrfs and certain raid configurations: "The write hole problem. Multiple disks (RAID) -> ZFS, otherwise BTRFS. snapshots?)? Within the Unraid array (not a multidrive ZFS pool), I am considering formatting my drives with the ZFS file system or BTRFS file system, as normal single drive "pools" (i. very little planning ahead required. Not sure if it's a perfect solution, but my workaround was to use a ZVol and format it with EXT4, and put docker on that. But I am trying out different scenarios and will eventually make a choice. I've just heard that resilvering ZFS is much much faster than RAID. Again, zfs IS superior as a file system. With btrfs I usually use the very latest kernel (Arch Linux or Fedora) and a couple of times I had been bitten by data-losing bugs, the last one being 6 years ago. BTRFS: Used to be a huge fun of this FS. The latter comes from Debian/whatever distro years as ZFS isn't a first class Linux citizen. RAID vs ZFS is like saying Space Shuttle vs F-150. With Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Christmas coming up I can plan to get enough SSDs for a raid 10 type setup in either case. Personally, I think btrfs should be abandoned for zfs as a server file system. 2. ZFS on Linux is available on Debian, the only downside being the zfs-dkms stuff that needs manual intervention after kernel updates (and some potential reduced performance due to the usual open source vs. Unraid is just good old xfs (or btrfs, but that also has/had it's issues, and now you can do zfs, even on individual array disks, something that might be the best solution going forward) with some parity magic on top of it. The way BTRFS handles RAID 1, I get at best the safety of a RAID 5 (i. You can do zfs/btrfs for learning purposes, though - but only if you are enjoying tinkering with the system. true i don't know. With persistent external SSD write caches, which both ZFS and BTRFS both support, the transaction will be present on the next boot, and flushed when the pool is available. ZFS command and options are easier to understand than BTRFS. ZFS can do atomic writes if you have a specific usecase in mind since it's a cow filesystem. Forget hardware or software raid just focus on ZFS raid z. But I have changed my 4 pool ZFS to 2 btrfs, just single drives, and 1 running ZFS. I, personally, and very subjectively, prefer xfs. I've heard ZFS is the best for redundancy if you're doing more than 2 drives. I'm stuck on storage though, since I'm not familiar with ZFS, the single large drive is cheaper, but the parity from raid 5 could be nice. Restoring snapshot of BTRFS is more flexible than ZFS You can restore any snapshot of BTRFS. Zfs. ZFS does offer some advantages (similar to all pure-RAID systems), but if I wanted pure RAID, I would have built a RAID server as opposed to an UnRAID server. 2. If I didn't do this, I would stick with the default file system for the cache array, which I believe is btrfs. I’ve used BTRFS for over a year now and it’s been as solid so far as ZFS ever was and is way more flexible. . zfs is more widely used in the self hosting / nas world. EXT4 Btrfs supports resizing, where ZFS can only grow. 20 votes, 13 comments. Btrfs does raid 1/0/10 well / Zfs does all the raids well. I like btrfs because it does not require a lot of ram like zcache does and you can use dissimilar drive sizes. In practice, I don't consider the Btrfs slowdown really relevant for desktop usage on an SSD, VM performance aside. OP was literally asking about bit-rot, which can be automatically healed by btrfs/ZFS when using double/raid1+. You want at least 3, preferably 4 physical disks and you want ZFS to handle RAID. I just used BTRFS for the kicks and giggles. partitions or filesystems usually land on Logical volumes, so it's unorthodox to use a logical volume as the backing store of a If you're going with a single-disk zfs boot/root, look into this proof-of-concept script to make a file-based ZFS mirror backup over sshfs/samba. Personally I have changed my SSD caches to be mirror ZFS pools. The reason for this ordering is the potential gains for volume aware filesystems, similar to stratis, zfs, btrfs, etc. I prefer ZFS over the rest, but every distro's default filesystem works just fine in my experience as long as you're aware of what it can and can't do and plan accordingly. I'd say keep using ZFS, it's a file system that's older than BTRFS and hence has had more idiots stumble upon edge cases with ZFS than BTRFS. Don't boot from a ZFS -> BTRFS. (Like full B TLDR, Synology's implementation of Btrfs should be equivalent to ZFS in protection against bitrot. More suitable for NAS usecase. I'd say it depends a bit on what you want to achieve. to expand a 4 drive raid5 array, you need to expand the array with 4 more drives. Either one can be thick or thin provisioned, although in both cases 'thick' is just a size reservation and not a guarantee that blocks will be on a certain part of the disk. I am debating whether or not to use ZFS or BTRFS, many people praise ZFS and BTRFS has a bad rep it seems when I google around. Followers 0. vkswslhynobtbsryvvniixnbjislwhcnfrvfqcwzgfslsumqp