3 ms·
Single, raid 0, 1, 10 are stable on stable hardware. Where ZFS is definitely more mature is parity raid. If you need parity raid and a snapshotting Cow filesyst
by cmurf 11y ago
Single, raid 0, 1, 10 are stable on stable hardware. Where ZFS is definitely more mature is parity raid. If you need parity raid and a snapshotting Cow filesystem and you're not a tester, then you'd want to pick ZFS. But Btrfs is ~ 6 years behind ZFS maturity wise? Maybe in some sense longer because ZFS had a more aggressive start?
There are definitely things Btrfs can already do that ZFS cannot, like read-writable snapshots, no parent-child dependency (you can create a snapshot and immediately delete the original), growing pools is easier/faster without having to build new arrays or sequentially replace devices and resilver, etc. And just in the last week there's an experimental encryption patch for per subvolume encryption (eventually per file similar to f2fs and ext4), so the situation is heavy development.
- cmurf 11y agoAn often missed feature is the seed device. Any Btrfs volume can be flagged as a read-only seed. Mount it, you can add a 2nd device, and now re-mount. It's a union filesystem like thing. Changes only go to the 2nd device. If you used 'btrfs remove" on the 1st device, data is migrated to the 2nd device and the 1st is removed, so it replicates the filesystem. The seed setting can be applied to multiple device volumes. So you can add this 2nd device, make that volume a read-only seen, and add a 3rd device for read-write, and so on.
- cmurf 11y agoAnother is Btrfs is quite usable on embedded systems, e.g. 32-bit ARM. I'm curious if anyone would use ZFS in such a case?