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Tell me why I shouldn't use btrfs (lemmy.zip)
submitted 17 hours ago by possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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About a year ago I switched to ZFS for Proxmox so that I wouldn't be running technology preview.

Btrfs gave me no issues for years and I even replaced a dying disk with no issues. I use raid 1 for my Proxmox machines. Anyway I moved to ZFS and it has been a less that ideal experience. The separate kernel modules mean that I can't downgrade the kernel plus the performance on my hardware is abysmal. I get only like 50-100mb/s vs the several hundred I would get with btrfs.

Any reason I shouldn't go back to btrfs? There seems to be a community fear of btrfs eating data or having unexplainable errors. That is sad to hear as btrfs has had lots of time to mature in the last 8 years. I would never have considered it 5-6 years ago but now it seems like a solid choice.

Anyone else pondering or using btrfs? It seems like a solid choice.

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[-] vividspecter@lemm.ee 29 points 17 hours ago

No reason not to. Old reputations die hard, but it's been many many years since I've had an issue.

I like also that btrfs is a lot more flexible than ZFS which is pretty strict about the size and number of disks, whereas you can upgrade a btrfs array ad hoc.

I'll add to avoid RAID5/6 as that is still not considered safe, but you mentioned RAID1 which has no issues.

[-] TwiddleTwaddle 3 points 15 hours ago

I've been vaguely planning on using btrfs in raid5 for my next storage upgrade. Is it really so bad?

[-] sntx@lemm.ee 1 points 8 hours ago

It's affected by the write-hole phenomenon. In BTRFS case that can mean that perfectly good old data might corrupt without any notice.

[-] vividspecter@lemm.ee 7 points 14 hours ago

Check status here. It looks like it may be a little better than the past, but I'm not sure I'd trust it.

An alternative approach I use is mergerfs + snapraid + snapraid-btrfs. This isn't the best idea for a system drive, but if it's something like a NAS it works well and snapraid-btrfs doesn't have the write hole issues that normal snapraid does since it operates on r/o snapshots instead of raw data.

this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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