Hi All,

 

I'm looking to install a brand new 6.2 system (moving from nas4free/zfs) and I have a question regarding files systems.  My plan was to use BTRFS for everything however I'm wondering if it has the same limitation as ZFS as the recommendation is not to use more than 80% of your drive otherwise you end up with a performance penalty.  If that is the case does XFS suffer the same performance hit?  I'm looking to maximize my $/drive which is why I'm moving away from ZFS.  I don't want to end up in a similar situation.

 

Thanks

The default is XFS for the drives in the array and that is what most folks are using on new servers.  (A number of folks actually  have converted reiserfs to XFS on older systems even tough it a real pain to do so!)  From what I have read, XFS does not have any performance issues as the the drives fill up.  Plus, it is very easy to actually recover the data from good drives in case a catastrophic failure when using XFS. 

 

Many folks, who are using BTRFS, are using it for their cache drive(s).  It provides some added features when using Dockers and VM's that are very beneficial.  Plus, I understand when you setup a cache pool, you can get drive failure protection to protect the data stored there. 

The only reason why I was thinking of BTRFS was that in a year or two I was hoping to skip the XFS to BTRFS conversion pain.  I'm sure there will be new must have features that require BTRFS and XFS isn't going to get them.  Given that distros are now shipping BTRFS as the default.....Hold that thought...In looking for a list of distros that are defaulting to BTRFS I came across this: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg51348.html

 

Not wanting to turn this into a BTRFS stability war I think I'll just stick with XFS.  I've used XFS in the past with much success and  thank you for the additional information regarding the on it. 

Not wanting to turn this into a BTRFS stability war I think I'll just stick with XFS.  I've used XFS in the past with much success and  thank you for the additional information regarding the on it.

This is the conclusion that many here have come to as well. The word I would use to describe BTRFS is brittle. It works well when everything is ok, but if you have to power down uncleanly, or have a flaky disk, or some other little glitch, it seems to really effect BTRFS badly, and recovering is a chore. XFS seems to handle the little bumps and hitches that seem to be unavoidable when you tinker with your system much more gracefully.