this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2023
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What filesystem is currently best for a single nvme drive with regard to performance read/write as well as stability/no file loss? ext4 seems very old, btrfs is used by RHEL, ZFS seems to be quite good... what do people tend to use nowadays? What is an arch users go-to filesystem?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

O use ext4 at home and in servers that are not SLES HANA DB ones.

On SLES HANA servers I use ext4 for everything but the database partitions, for which SAP and SUSE support and recommend XFS.

In a few occasions people left the non-db partitions as the default on SUSE install, btrfs, with default settings. That turned out to cause unnecessary disk and processor usage.

I would be ashamed of justifying btrfs on a server for the possibility of undoing "broken things". Maybe in a distro hopping, system tinkering, unstable release home computer, but not in a server. You don't play around in a server to "break things" that often. Linux (differently from Windows) servers don't break themselves at the software level. For hardware breakages, there's RAID, backups, and HA reduntant systems, because if it's a hardware issue btrfs isn't going to save you - even if you get back that corrupted file, you won't keep running in that hardware, nor trust that "this" was the only and last file it corrupted.

EDIT: somewhat offtopic: I never use LVM. Call me paranoid and old fashioned, but I really prefer knowing where my data is, whole.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Facebook was using btrfs for some usecases. Not sure what you mean by breaking things?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most comments suggesting btrfs were justifying it for the possibility of rolling back to a previous state of files when something breaks (not a btrfs breakage, but mishaps on the system requiring an "undo").

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah, I see. While that use may be a good plan for home server, doing that for production server seems like a bandaid solution to having a test server and controlling deployed changes very carefully.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Exactly. A waste of server resources, as a productions server is not tinkerable, and shouldn't "break".

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Ext4 for general pupose linux. Zfs for bsd network drives

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I like btrfs cause of transparent compression but I'm pretty sure other filesystems like ZFS have that too

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

ext4.

Never used arch; just slackware and then enterprise linux.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

For both my home server and desktop I use XFS for root and ZFS (in some variety of raid or mirror) for /home and data storage. Any time I've tried btrfs for root (such as default fedora), inevitably it poops the bed. At this point, I stay far away from btrfs.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hi all. Apologies to hijack this thread. Figured it should be OK since it's also on the topic of file systems.

Long story short, I need to reinstall Nobara OS and I plan to install Nobara on my smaller SSD drive with btrfs and set my /home folder to my larger nvme. I'm thinking of using ext4 for my /home and have snapshots of the main system stored on the nvme. Looking for a sanity check to see if this is OK or if I should be doing things differently. Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So you're going to make snapshots of the ext4 filesystem onto the BTRFS one?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

On the contrary, my intention is to make snapshots of the OS (btrfs) and my idea is to store the snapshots on the /home nvme drive (ext4).

I don't know if that's the standard practice or if I'm over complicating things. My SSD is only 240Gb (I think) while my nvme is a 1Tb drive, thus the intention to store snapshots on the nvme. Maybe the 240Gb is sufficient for say a month's worth of snapshots plus the OS?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's more important to backup your /home than /. /home is where you store your crucial files.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, that's true. Then again, I'm mainly using my PC for gaming and most of what will be in /home will be game installs. I have my photos and music backups in a separate HDD.

I think at the end of the day, what I'm trying to achieve with the btrfs snapshots is to be able to roll back my OS in case a system update goes wrong, or I did something I shouldn't have. :p

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, that’s a very bad idea. BTRFS has deduplication, without that the snapshots would take up way to much space. Also it’s too many writes since ext4 doesn’t use cow and would have to do distinct writes for every snapshot.

The 240 gb are plenty for a root system without /home and years worth of snapshots on a btrfs volume, only the changes take up space so the amount of snapshots hardly matters.

For /home either ext4, xfs or btrfs is fine. Personally I only use a single btrfs volume and put certain folders in their own subvolumes so they can have different settings for snapshots(no snapshots for /home, tmp and cache folders).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Noted. Thanks for your clear response. I'll just keep it simple have the OS snapshots on the same partition.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For what? Client on a laptop or PC? Why not f2fs? On a server just trust good ol ext4 with some flash drive settings.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

it would be for a PC and normal work/home use

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

My current setup is fedora for the last 6 months. I started a live session, installed f2fs and then run the installer with a combination of f2fs + encryption. And it runs flawlessly and faster than any setup before.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Great for USBs

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

oh I just read up on this last knight. Yes ext4 is old but it is used because it is still works quite well. btrfs, dis anyone say that as butfarts, can handle much larger partitions ext4 maxes out at a few tb while btfrs can get much larger. ZFS can handle a around a billion tb but it needs a lot more resources to to even start

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