josetann

I've read about issues with btrfs, but haven't seen anything saying WHY. I've only used btrfs in a proxmox setup with two 1TB NVME drives in a mirror, with unRAID I've only used xfs (except when unRAID was ReiserFS only, but we don't talk about that). So you're saying that if I use at least somewhat quality hardware (currently using enterprise drives, I have used SMR consumer drives in the past though) and have ECC RAM (so shouldn't have ram issues), I shouldn't have the issues others are reporting with btrfs? Do you think it's more reliable than zfs with semi-quality hardware?

It may still be the recommendation. I've had literally zero problems using xfs, I have no problem recommending it. I just really like the idea of being able to take snapshots (I had a nightmare where one of my family members who knew better, clicked something they shouldn't and now everyone's mad at me because I should have known about ransomware). I've been a bit lazy when it comes to proper backups, snapshots would help mitigate some of the risk that's a result of said laziness. Plus it's cool, I like cool.

Currently have two mechanical 14TB drives (neither SMR) with one data and one parity. Doing a new build, something a tiny bit more power efficient than my Z420. Going to replace one of the 14TB drives with a 15.36TB U.2 SSD. Don't worry, I've already been told that I should under no circumstances use an SSD as a drive in an unRAID array, but I'm going to anyway 😀 Currently using xfs, but I'd really, REALLY like to have native snapshot support. I figure now is as good a time as any to change filesystems, so, what would you do? Switch to the new hotness ZFS, because it's new and awesome and features!!!! Switch to BTRFS. It's not as flashy, but it is a bit more mature...at least when it comes to unRAID support. Stay with XFS, snapshots are for wimps! I wouldn't be looking to setup a ZFS pool as cache, so I know that a lot of ZFS's awesomeness would be lost on my setup (just a single drive/vdev in an array, plus a mechanical drive for parity). I also don't need ZFS's ability to eat RAM to speed up access, since the data drive would be an enterprise ssd. Yes, writes would be abysmally slow, but that hasn't been a concern yet (read speeds are another issue, I'm having the infamous MacOS smb issues, but I've stopped messing with that until the new system is up and running). One minute I'm leaning ZFS because it really was made for this, even if I'm severely limiting its potential; the next minute I'm leaning toward BTRFS because I envision much lower system resource usage and better overall stability (not because BTRFS is better than ZFS, but because there's been more time to work out the kinks between unRAID and BTRFS). Or perhaps I should just rip out the old data drive, throw in the new U.2 drive, do a rebuild, and ask again next decade.