January 7, 20242 yr I guess this has been discussed before but I can't find the post, sorry (but will happily take links to previous discussions zfs has a good reputation because it's been there for a long time, yet there have been quacks recently with 6.12.4, 6.12.5, 6.12.6). btrfs has a bad reputation because of issues in the past, yet facebook/meta run their whole infrastructure on btrfs only. So, religion apart, when does it make sense to choose zfs over btrfs? CoW, snapshots, compression are supported by both. My understanding is that the one thing that zfs does better than btrfs is fixing issues in real time as they happen, while btrfs needs you to run a periodic scrub in order to fix things. The tradeoff, in my understanding, is that zfs uses more resources, especially RAM. zfs also supposedly has a better cache design but I could not find any benchmark where it shows that zfs actually has better performance than btrfs on an equivalent system. It seems than many people where waiting for unraid to support zfs, but what does it really change over using btrfs in the context of unraid? Thanks for your insights.
January 22, 20242 yr btrfs is good enough, unless you use Raid 5/6. So in the context of unraid, imho it's totally fine and sufficient.
January 22, 20242 yr The other big thing that btrfs provides in pools is the ability to add drives to a pool at any point, and they can be of mixed sizes rather like in the main array. ZFS is far more restricted in the expansion capabilities of a pool. The main thing I see zfs bringing to Unraid is performance advantages which for many people seems to be an important consideration.
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