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It seems like btrfs will gain a lot of traction, considering that Facebook invest a lot in it and it's the default FS in Fedora now.

by RMPR 6y ago

AsyncAwait 6y ago
Maybe. But I wonder if btrfs has been tainted as 'too unreliable' at this point, whether true or not.
throw0101a 6y ago
I first heard about Btrfs over ten years ago: what's taking it so long to 'gain traction'?
- IgorPartola 6y ago
  My guess is bugs. Early on they had some serious bugs that lost people data. So the project gained this reputation of not being production-ready which meant that only people interested in playing with a new filesystem were using it. And btrfs has always been brought up alongside zfs which has been stable and mature for decades. As far as I can tell the only advantage btrfs has over zfs is the license. Outside of that, what does it offer that zfs does not? (That’s a serious question, I haven’t kept up with it because I’m a happy zfs user.)
  - Lex-2008 6y ago
    > what does btrfs offer that zfs does not? As @matheusmoreira mentioned - you can use harddisks of unequal size. I.e. three disks of 4+3+3 Tb in RAID1 will happily give you 5 Tb of usable space. AFAIK, no other filesystem can do that. Quoting @matheusmoreira further: > I can slowly buy drives of different capacities and add them to the file system one by one. I don't have to plan ahead of time like traditional RAID and ZFS setups. This is excellent for home data storage!
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      The new dRAID mechanism in ZFS may help with this: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdXOtEF6Fh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdXOtEF6Fh0
      - matheusmoreira 6y ago
        How? I don't see how it makes ZFS more flexible. Users still need to have every storage device installed on the computer before creating the RAID configuration. They can't start with the drives they already have and then add more drives over time. At least not without essentially recreating the array from scratch.

It seems like btrfs will gain a lot of traction, considering that Facebook invest a lot in it and it's the default FS in Fedora now.

by RMPR 6y ago

It seems like btrfs will gain a lot of traction, considering that Facebook invest a lot in it and it's the default FS in Fedora now.

AsyncAwait 6y ago

Maybe. But I wonder if btrfs has been tainted as 'too unreliable' at this point, whether true or not.

throw0101a 6y ago

I first heard about Btrfs over ten years ago: what's taking it so long to 'gain traction'?

IgorPartola 6y ago
My guess is bugs. Early on they had some serious bugs that lost people data. So the project gained this reputation of not being production-ready which meant that only people interested in playing with a new filesystem were using it. And btrfs has always been brought up alongside zfs which has been stable and mature for decades. As far as I can tell the only advantage btrfs has over zfs is the license. Outside of that, what does it offer that zfs does not? (That’s a serious question, I haven’t kept up with it because I’m a happy zfs user.)
- Lex-2008 6y ago
  > what does btrfs offer that zfs does not? As @matheusmoreira mentioned - you can use harddisks of unequal size. I.e. three disks of 4+3+3 Tb in RAID1 will happily give you 5 Tb of usable space. AFAIK, no other filesystem can do that. Quoting @matheusmoreira further: > I can slowly buy drives of different capacities and add them to the file system one by one. I don't have to plan ahead of time like traditional RAID and ZFS setups. This is excellent for home data storage!
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    The new dRAID mechanism in ZFS may help with this: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdXOtEF6Fh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdXOtEF6Fh0
    - matheusmoreira 6y ago
      How? I don't see how it makes ZFS more flexible. Users still need to have every storage device installed on the computer before creating the RAID configuration. They can't start with the drives they already have and then add more drives over time. At least not without essentially recreating the array from scratch.