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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

The hype is quite easy to understand. Snapshots and checksums are two complete game-changers. ZFS has them both. And there are no real alternatives in many cases.

I've personally waited for BTRFS longer than a decade but my use-cases are yet to be considered stable (not something you really mess with in regard to filesystems).

Honestly, as sure as I have been on the success of BTRFS I now consider BTRFS dead on arrival - if it will ever even arrive. The pace of development is slower than the universe around it, that might be too harsh but really - no RAID6 yet? A decade ago the impression I got was "soon". And now 2-drive parity is becoming obsolete.

ZFS has tons of warts for home-use, I agree. So, for a home-user with high demands I don't see anything exciting in the future.

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There were a bunch of btrfs raid56 patches last year. I think the known bugs have been addressed and is just that the wiki page hasn't been updated.

Re obsolete, are you referring to RAID1C3?

I'm thinking of this:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-20...

I'd much prefer something like raidz3 compared to the authors setup.

RAID1C3 is nice but very expensive for use in bulk storage at home.

What warts do you speak of?

No defragmentation, and as far as I'm aware all copy-on-write filesystems suffer greatly from fragmentation once utilization goes too high. ZFS will never recover unless you restart from scratch.

No way to rebalance a pool. Also increasing a pool always results in less reliability (in terms of drive losses that results in the whole pool going down).

No proper recovery tools if something goes wrong.

Then the lack of flexibility talked about in the article. This means the up-front cost and total cost is vastly more than a more typical setup where you can buy drives spread out over many years and take advantage of falling prices, less power consumption and noise (in part because you typically start such an array with higher density drives, since the low cost and longevity allows you to).

Probably forgot some other reasons.

That said I still use zfs (freenas) at home. But because of the above it is quite hard to blindly recommend it.

lvm and hence ext4 etc have had snapshots for ages.

As do NTFS. But they are not really comparable to "real" filesystem snapshotting, at least not in my opinion.

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