What file systems are you using on your devices and why?
What file systems are you using on your devices and why?
I want to learn more about file systems from the practical point of view so I know what to expect, how to approach them and what experience positive or negative you had / have.
I found this wikipedia's comparison but I want your hands-on views.
For now my mental list is
- NTFS - for some reason TVs on USB love these and also Windows + Linux can read and write this
- Ext4 - solid fs with journaling but Linux specific
- Btrfs - some modern fs with snapshot capability, Linux specific
- xfs - servers really like these as they are performant, Linux specific
- FAT32 - limited but recognizable everywhere
- exFAT - like FAT32 but less recognizable and less limited
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Been running BTRFS since 2010. Ext2/3/4 before that.
Using it for CoW, de-duplication, compression. My home file server has had a long-lived array of mis-matched devices. Started at 4x2TB, through 6x4TB and now 2x18+4TB. I just move up a size whenever a disk fails.
That's sound fantastic! Interesting that you didn't mentiona anything about snapshots. Have you had some isshes with BTRFS since then?
Well, snapshots, too. I just consider them to be a special case of de-duplication.
I had an issue when I ran out of space during conversion between RAID profiles a few years back. I didn't lose any data, but I couldn't get the array to mount (and stay) read-write.
Btrfs isn't stable in big configurations. The big issue is that resilvering takes a long time and hurts performance. ZFS is the right answer.
I'm sure it's great and all, but the hassle of having a filesystem that's not in the kernel is a no-starter for me. Maybe one of those fancy NAS-distros that are based on some *BSD.
Linux works fine with ZFS. I wouldn't use it as your boot device but for big storage it is very reliable and stable. It also can take advantage of ram with Arc and has optional special disks. (Metadata disk, slog and cache as an example)