May 4, 201610 yr I'll soon be undertaking a new unRaid server build but I'm not sure of the best FS to use. My current server has 6 drives and is my household system. It's heavily used for Plex, Sonarr etc and runs 2 x VMs (Win Server for Exchange and Win 10 for various) and all drives are formatted as BTRFS. The use of the new server will be virtually identical with the addition of 2 more VMs. Given the use case what is the best FS to use?
May 4, 201610 yr Author Most people would recommend XFS for the array disks and BTRFS for the cache pool. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each FS. Can you please explain the reasoning behind your recommendation. Thanks
May 5, 201610 yr Most people would recommend XFS for the array disks and BTRFS for the cache pool. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each FS. Can you please explain the reasoning behind your recommendation. Thanks RiserFS is stable, but is end of life and isn't going to receive much future support (we had an issue about a year ago where an riserFS caused data loss because of it's lack of maintenance), the RFS file system check tool / repair is pretty great however. XFS is stable, widely supported and doesn't have the issues with nearly full drives like RFS. The XFS file system check tool is pretty good. BTRFS is the new kid on the block, it allows pooling (think Raid 1 at the file system level), some people have experienced corruption but not many... the BTRFS file system check and repair process is pretty new and people haven't had as much luck. It's improving constantly however. TL;DR XFS is great for data disks because it's stable and widely supported and doesn't have slowdown issues as drives get close to being full. BTRFS is used for cache to allow cache pooling, if it wasn't for the pooling feature I would assume people would use XFS for cache...
May 5, 201610 yr Just remember (and I'm sure you know, but I feel the need to reiterate), changing a file system from BTRFS to XFS will wipe the data. Since your existing drives are BTRFS you could simply mount them in the server, assign them to a new array and be on your way w/o any data migration at all.
May 5, 201610 yr Author In a nutshell, if my drives are already formatted as BTRFS then just leave them as such?
May 5, 201610 yr In a nutshell, if my drives are already formatted as BTRFS then just leave them as such? If they're already BTRFS leave them as BTRFS, but when they corrupt beyond repair you should reformat as XFS before you restore the data from backups.
May 5, 201610 yr In a nutshell, if my drives are already formatted as BTRFS then just leave them as such? If they're already BTRFS leave them as BTRFS, but when they corrupt beyond repair you should reformat as XFS before you restore the data from backups. All this assumes that either a. All drives currently have a single partition formatted BTRFS standalone so they can be assigned as array members (not likely) or b. Assign all BTRFS drives as members of the cache pool, and hope unraid doesn't try to change the current BTRFS layout, and not assign any drives to the array proper. If a full set of current backups does not exist, I'd leave the current layout alone as the backup, and populate a new array with XFS formatted drives and copy the data over.
May 5, 201610 yr What are the advantages and disadvantages of each FS. Can you please explain the reasoning behind your recommendation. I liked gundamguy's summary, but if you want more, see File systems.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.