Always used XFS Data Disks looking at BTRFS Data Disks any advantages?

[Maticks]

I've always used XFS Data Disks but with now two disks wiped and needing to rebuilding parity drives after my LSI Card failure.

I am thinking.. BTRFS has matured a bit now, any advantage formatting my new Data Disks for BTRFS?

 

The repair tools were a bit of an issue a while back that seems to be fixed.

XFS is old and trusted, but BTRFS has checksum which seems to be good for a drive that is going bad.

Any other overhead disadvantages or advantages using BTRFS?

[JorgeB]

There are several threads discussing this, but basically, btrfs advantages are snapshots and checksums, disadvantages are a practically non working fsck and although much better now still not as stable as xfs.

 

 

[lionelhutz]

With a single disk, the checksum can only tell you the data is bad. It's not capable of fixing it. It can fix the file system metadata.

 

The only time I tried BTRFS on a spinner, the checksum was just a handy way to confirm the disk had corrupted even though I already knew it was. If you do chose to use it, then I'd recommend you stress test the file system before trusting it.

[JorgeB]

6 minutes ago, lionelhutz said:

It can fix the file system metadata.

It can but it doesn't by default since unRAID formats the disks with single metadata, unlike btrfs default behavior, I already asked Tom do change that but for now you need to convert the metadata profile to DUP, it can de done at any time but should be done before there's any data since it's much faster, e.g:

 

btrfs balance start -mconvert=dup /mnt/disk8