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Reading through most comments and I still think a few points are worth mentioning: * btrfs has a few features that are Really Nice and missing in ZFS: ability

Reading through most comments and I still think a few points are worth mentioning: * btrfs has a few features that are Really Nice and missing in ZFS: ability of have a file system of mixed drives and adding and removing drives at will, with rebalancing. With ZFS growing a file system is painful and shrinking impossible(? still?). There has been work on it recently though. * ZFS has a IMO MUCH cleaner design and concepts (pool & filesystems); mirrored by a much cleaner and clearer set of commands. Working with btrfs still feels like an unfinished hack. As human error is still a major concern, this is not a trivial issue. I _have_ lost data to MD, had scary issues with BTRFS, but never had issues with ZFS in 8+ years. (The fact that FreeNAS is FreeBSD based which I'm less inclined to mess with also means that I mostly leave my appliance alone.)

agapon 7y ago
> With ZFS growing a file system is painful and shrinking impossible You probably mean something else rather than a file system. In ZFS you do not need to grow or shrink file systems at all.
- glandium 7y ago
  Unless you want to add, remove or replace disks.
- FullyFunctional 7y ago
  Sorry, I did mean a pool, but as is pointed out, it's being worked on.
rdc12 7y ago
Device removal was added in the recent ZoL 0.8 release, so with that you can remove a vdev that is either a sole drive, or a mirror. Currently it can't be used to remove a RAIDZx vdev thou. It does carry a memory overhead for a remap table , but this does shrink as old allocations are retired back to the pool. And the first alpha for RAIDZ expansion became available a week or two ago. (For going from say a 6 disk RAIDZ2 vdev, to a 7+ disk RAIDZ2 vdev). Just in case anyone decides to play with this feature, the on disk format for this feature is not stable yet, only use it on test pools.

agapon 7y ago

> With ZFS growing a file system is painful and shrinking impossible You probably mean something else rather than a file system. In ZFS you do not need to grow or shrink file systems at all.

glandium 7y ago
Unless you want to add, remove or replace disks.
FullyFunctional 7y ago
Sorry, I did mean a pool, but as is pointed out, it's being worked on.

rdc12 7y ago

Device removal was added in the recent ZoL 0.8 release, so with that you can remove a vdev that is either a sole drive, or a mirror. Currently it can't be used to remove a RAIDZx vdev thou. It does carry a memory overhead for a remap table , but this does shrink as old allocations are retired back to the pool. And the first alpha for RAIDZ expansion became available a week or two ago. (For going from say a 6 disk RAIDZ2 vdev, to a 7+ disk RAIDZ2 vdev). Just in case anyone decides to play with this feature, the on disk format for this feature is not stable yet, only use it on test pools.