JonathanM Posted March 6, 2016 Share Posted March 6, 2016 So i'm new to unRAID and like many others i too have my doubt about witch file system to choose, and since this thread is a bit old i was thinking what have changed over there years. So is BTRFS still as "bad"? My take on it is that BTRFS is more fragile than the other formats. If everything is perfect hardware wise, BTRFS is fine. If you power off your system without shutting it down properly, due to a crash, bad power, whatever, BTRFS is more likely to come up unmountable, and be a real pain to recover. It's advertised as being resilient, but my personal experience and anecdotal evidence here in unraid land suggests otherwise. Just to add insult to injury, V6 seems to be less capable of running smoothly with ReiserFS than previous versions, so my personal experience was that a ReiserFS slowdown and eventual lockup under heavy load (semi common on V6) caused my BTRFS cache drive to become corrupt. The Reiser disks were fine after a forced powerdown, but the BTRFS drive, not so much. Now that I have migrated all my drives to XFS, no more issues. Quote Link to comment
isvein Posted March 6, 2016 Share Posted March 6, 2016 BTRFS can't be that bad, Synology is switching to it in the next version of DSM Quote Link to comment
gundamguy Posted March 7, 2016 Share Posted March 7, 2016 BTRFS can't be that bad, Synology is switching to it in the next version of DSM It's not that bad, but Synology has the benefit of being in a closed ecosystem. Quote Link to comment
c3 Posted March 7, 2016 Share Posted March 7, 2016 So i'm new to unRAID and like many others i too have my doubt about witch file system to choose, and since this thread is a bit old i was thinking what have changed over there years. So is BTRFS still as "bad"? My take on it is that BTRFS is more fragile than the other formats. If everything is perfect hardware wise, BTRFS is fine. If you power off your system without shutting it down properly, due to a crash, bad power, whatever, BTRFS is more likely to come up unmountable, and be a real pain to recover. It's advertised as being resilient, but my personal experience and anecdotal evidence here in unraid land suggests otherwise. Just to add insult to injury, V6 seems to be less capable of running smoothly with ReiserFS than previous versions, so my personal experience was that a ReiserFS slowdown and eventual lockup under heavy load (semi common on V6) caused my BTRFS cache drive to become corrupt. The Reiser disks were fine after a forced powerdown, but the BTRFS drive, not so much. Now that I have migrated all my drives to XFS, no more issues. If there is truth to this, the cache pool is a horrible problem waiting to explode. This is unprotected data. Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted March 8, 2016 Share Posted March 8, 2016 So i'm new to unRAID and like many others i too have my doubt about witch file system to choose, and since this thread is a bit old i was thinking what have changed over there years. So is BTRFS still as "bad"? My take on it is that BTRFS is more fragile than the other formats. If everything is perfect hardware wise, BTRFS is fine. If you power off your system without shutting it down properly, due to a crash, bad power, whatever, BTRFS is more likely to come up unmountable, and be a real pain to recover. It's advertised as being resilient, but my personal experience and anecdotal evidence here in unraid land suggests otherwise. Just to add insult to injury, V6 seems to be less capable of running smoothly with ReiserFS than previous versions, so my personal experience was that a ReiserFS slowdown and eventual lockup under heavy load (semi common on V6) caused my BTRFS cache drive to become corrupt. The Reiser disks were fine after a forced powerdown, but the BTRFS drive, not so much. Now that I have migrated all my drives to XFS, no more issues. If there is truth to this, the cache pool is a horrible problem waiting to explode. This is unprotected data. Not saying there is a universal issue, just sharing my anecdotal evidence. Every time it happens, limetech staff blame it on a hardware problem, it's never BTRFS that is the issue. I can accept that, but with the caveat that it seems to be much harder to recover data than it ever was from Reiser. I was eventually able to get my unmountable BTRFS disk to rescue mount after force discarding the journal!!! Any attempt to replay the transaction journal was futile. That same hardware hasn't hiccuped once since my XFS migration, so I guess BTRFS stressed my system enough to uncover a hardware problem. I would be very cautious with force quitting any system with BTRFS in use. Quote Link to comment
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