Hacker News Reader

Comment by barumrho | Hacker News Reader

Curious to learn, what are the differentiators of ZFS? File system seems like an invisible layer to me personally which makes me ask this question.

View on HN

Well, ZFS way of managing disks is really comfy to me, and, The way datasets and snapshots work, let me have really space efficient game modding.

I wrote a bit more about this on my extremely simple blog

https://sleepycatgirl.github.io/html/zfs.html

Interesting read, thanks

zero-copy snapshots, end-to-end validation of writes and checksummable data integrity, built-in logical/physical device management, and a very intelligent caching layer that uses spare RAM to handle MRU/MFU for both filesystem metadata and the data itself.

Along with a track record of being generally reliable and stable, under intense commercial workloads.

Yeah... While I don't make use of some things (Like, I only have 1HDD, 1SDD (I do plan to change that once I will be building new PC though), so no RAID-Z for me, still, the way datasets work, made things painless (I mean, I can finally have separate / partition by simply making dataset, but not waste space from having separate partition with conventional filesystem, and this just works)) but still, on the desktop, it is a very pleasant experience. Though, there is still a lot for me to learn about ZFS (Stuff like L2ARC, SLOG and such) but that is fine, those things will come with time =w=

Snapshots and device pools are my favorites. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Features

I use snapshots for personal backups, but on BTFS, and it's amazingly simple. 2 LOC: Rsync home to drive and make snapshot.

is BTFS production ready? as in, is it stable these days?

I am using it for years and ceased to run into problems about 3 years ago. Production ready as in building a business on it. I would not. Storing your personal important stuff (and have backups in place): yes. Unimportant personal stuff: also very much yes.

BTRFS has been stable for a while, except for RAID 5/6. However you can use RAID 1 for all intents as RAID 1 provides essentially RAID 5/6 and is much more flexible.

With BTRFS RAID 1 you can set the number of drives, and the number of duplicate data, and can use mixed sized drives. Due to this, I would recommend RAID 1 over RAID 5/6 anyway even if RAID 5/6 was fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com