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submitted 2 years ago by swizzle9144 to c/linux@lemmy.ml

I'm shopping for a new NVMe SSD drive for my laptop and with the second deciding factor being Linux compatibility, I'd looked up the names of specific drives in the source code of Linux and discovered that their controllers have quirks that have to be worked around.

Now, I figured out more or less how quirks affecting one of the controllers impact its functionality under Linux, but there's another controller that I have a trouble understanding how disabling the aforementioned command limits the functionality of, if at all; therefore I'd like to ask you all, under what circumstances is the command used by a host and can disabling it lower the performance or power efficiency of an impacted controller/drive?

To be clear, the quirk workaround I'm talking a about is NVME_QUIRK_DISABLE_WRITE_ZEROES.

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[-] yote_zip@pawb.social 5 points 2 years ago

That's nonsense and couldn't be affected by BTRFS short of something catastrophic happening (probably in the kernel).

The main downside for NVME that I'd be aware of is that BTRFS is a lot slower to write lots of tiny files than something like XFS (which is generally the fastest filesystem available). I'd guess this is due to BTRFS's metadata overhead, which includes writing two copies of metadata for redundancy. I have a very fast gen 4 NVME and I can get ~2GBPS tiny file write speed with XFS and ~300MBPS tiny file write speed with BTRFS. IMO this is negligible though, because tiny files are inherently tiny - 300MB of tiny files is a lot of files for 1 second of effort. Also, usually read speed is more important than write speed for day-to-day tasks. Large file writes and large/small file reads are roughly the same though, with any small advantages going towards XFS.

BTRFS will never be faster than something like XFS because it has way more features - with how fast NVMEs are I personally think it's worth trading some of that ludicrous speed for features like data checksumming, compression, and snapshots. On the flip side, BTRFS is a very good idea to run on slow HDDs because its transparent compression will actually increase the drive's speed, as the act of compressing/decompressing is way faster than the act of reading physical data from rust.

this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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