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Which of zfs and btrfs is better on Linux? And which of the two works better with Windows (both have github drivers)? I'm looking to use on a personal computer

by fxfan 8y ago

Which of zfs and btrfs is better on Linux? And which of the two works better with Windows (both have github drivers)? I'm looking to use on a personal computer on a partition shared between Linux and Windows

rocqua 8y ago
From my research: ZFS is more stable, has the downside of not allowing expansion of volumes, and has the issue of not being upstreamed. BTRfs has the option to expand volumes, is native to Linux, but has a wiff of unstability. Most notably with the persisting raid 5 write hole. I haven't found a good choice yet. Though I think I'd go btrfs at the moment.
- tomatocracy 8y ago
  Zfs does allow pools to be expanded by adding vdevs. What it doesn’t allow is for raid sets to be expanded by replacing with larger disks one at a time. This can however be done with mirrored sets. Add new larger discs to the mirror set, wait for resilvering, remove older smaller discs, done. 0.8 will also bring the ability to remove vdevs so effectively shrink a pool through a similar (but slightly different) process.
  - mbreese 8y ago
    But even though you can add vdevs, it doesn’t rebalance the mirror. This means your entire pool, albeit larger, is still slower. (Unless this is a change that will be brought about in 0.8, I haven’t followed that closely).
  - radiowave 8y ago
    Not quite right - you absolutely can expand raidz vdevs by replacing the disks one at a time. What you can't do is increase the "width" of the raidz, or seamlessly rebalance data between multiple vdevs.
- josteink 8y ago
  > ZFS is more stable, has the downside of not allowing expansion of volumes No longer true. I’ve expanded volumes on Ubuntu with ZoL.
meruru 8y ago
I switched to FreeBSD solely because of ZFS, but if I had to use Linux it would be with ZFS too. It's much older and proven. Everything else seems to not be ready yet while ZFS has been stable for years and it keeps advancing ahead of the competition.
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
I hear btrfs is fine on single drives. ZFS is in general what you want to use if you care about your data, at least in RAID setups. I imagine either should work fine over SAMBA (if that's what you have in mind for Windows). I know there's some work being done to get ZFS working on Windows, and I don't believe there's anything of the sort for btrfs.
Dylan16807 8y ago
BTRFS can get exceedingly slow if you make lots of snapshots (even if you don't keep very many at a time). ZFS works well for basic data storage and snapshots, but the deduplication has a ton of overhead and is extremely slow on hard drives. And there is no way to make a plain copy-on-write copy of a file without using the full deduplication mode. I haven't tried either on windows directly, I've accessed them as a file share via a VM.
usefulcat 8y ago
We have been using ZFS for a couple of years now with ubuntu on 4 machines managing a total of ~160 TB of raw storage and have had 0 problems. We chose it mainly because we wanted something very reliable with checksumming and because we consider it to be much more mature and stable than btrfs. Prior to that we used proprietary RAID hardware that, while fast, did not have checksumming and was frankly a nightmare to manage. If I had it to do over, I'd choose ZFS again.

by fxfan 8y ago

rocqua 8y ago

From my research: ZFS is more stable, has the downside of not allowing expansion of volumes, and has the issue of not being upstreamed. BTRfs has the option to expand volumes, is native to Linux, but has a wiff of unstability. Most notably with the persisting raid 5 write hole. I haven't found a good choice yet. Though I think I'd go btrfs at the moment.

tomatocracy 8y ago
Zfs does allow pools to be expanded by adding vdevs. What it doesn’t allow is for raid sets to be expanded by replacing with larger disks one at a time. This can however be done with mirrored sets. Add new larger discs to the mirror set, wait for resilvering, remove older smaller discs, done. 0.8 will also bring the ability to remove vdevs so effectively shrink a pool through a similar (but slightly different) process.
- mbreese 8y ago
  But even though you can add vdevs, it doesn’t rebalance the mirror. This means your entire pool, albeit larger, is still slower. (Unless this is a change that will be brought about in 0.8, I haven’t followed that closely).
- radiowave 8y ago
  Not quite right - you absolutely can expand raidz vdevs by replacing the disks one at a time. What you can't do is increase the "width" of the raidz, or seamlessly rebalance data between multiple vdevs.
josteink 8y ago
> ZFS is more stable, has the downside of not allowing expansion of volumes No longer true. I’ve expanded volumes on Ubuntu with ZoL.

meruru 8y ago

I switched to FreeBSD solely because of ZFS, but if I had to use Linux it would be with ZFS too. It's much older and proven. Everything else seems to not be ready yet while ZFS has been stable for years and it keeps advancing ahead of the competition.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

I hear btrfs is fine on single drives. ZFS is in general what you want to use if you care about your data, at least in RAID setups. I imagine either should work fine over SAMBA (if that's what you have in mind for Windows). I know there's some work being done to get ZFS working on Windows, and I don't believe there's anything of the sort for btrfs.

Dylan16807 8y ago

BTRFS can get exceedingly slow if you make lots of snapshots (even if you don't keep very many at a time). ZFS works well for basic data storage and snapshots, but the deduplication has a ton of overhead and is extremely slow on hard drives. And there is no way to make a plain copy-on-write copy of a file without using the full deduplication mode. I haven't tried either on windows directly, I've accessed them as a file share via a VM.

usefulcat 8y ago

We have been using ZFS for a couple of years now with ubuntu on 4 machines managing a total of ~160 TB of raw storage and have had 0 problems. We chose it mainly because we wanted something very reliable with checksumming and because we consider it to be much more mature and stable than btrfs. Prior to that we used proprietary RAID hardware that, while fast, did not have checksumming and was frankly a nightmare to manage. If I had it to do over, I'd choose ZFS again.