Which disk format should I be using? Just wondering if one preforms better and is more reliable than the other.

It is really up to you.   most people would say that XFS is the most mature system and is widely used for the array disks.   Having said that there are those who prefer BTRFS as it provides built-in checksumming at the file level.     For the cache pool it depends on whether you have more than one disk in the pool.    If you do then BTRFS is the only option.    If you only have a single disk then again the choice is up to you - and views are split as to whether XFS or BTRFS is the better choice.

If there's any doubt about the stability of your system, then XFS is the way to go.  BTRFS isn't very forgiving on unclean shutdowns etc.

On 4/12/2018 at 7:07 PM, Squid said:

BTRFS isn't very forgiving on unclean shutdowns etc.

 

It most definitely is, for single disk file systems. I have lots of embedded equipment in vehicles, and the equipment has no way of knowing when they cut the power. Maybe 50-100 devices/week that suffers a hard power loss - but no support tickets about broken file systems.

 

BTRFS might not be so forgiving for unclean shutdowns of multi-disk cache pools - there are so many more issues involved when synchronizing multi-device writes.

 

One important thing is that all parts of the software/hardware must correctly handle barrier requests, so a disk controller doesn't falsely claim that a write has been acknowledged by the storage device.