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Comment by slyall | Hacker News Reader

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slyall·

ext4 is for when you have a simple file system and want something solid.

xfs is for when you have a big file system, maybe some some unusual loads but you want stability.

zfs is for when you want RAID and snapshots but are prepared to have it blow up every now and then.

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> but are prepared to have it blow up every now and then.

First time I've heard that about ZFS, is that really a thing? It was made by Sun to be the ultimate industrial strength FS.

Actually just realized all the examples I was thinking of were BTRFS.

Apologies to the ZFS people

No offense taken, I've certainly had a few zfs headaches. But thankfully never anything that couldn't be worked out.

Might be missing a negation, then it's a comparison to btrfs.

Me, I'm waiting for bcachefs - Linux native and carefully designed.

bcachefs will have its share of teething issues. Being merged into mainline is only the first step of a very long journey.

if there is still just one guy working on it, i think it is dead on arrival.

I've been hearing about this bcachefs for ages

Nonetheless, ZFS definitely gets "angsty" under certain workloads, owing to it being a garbage-collected file system. It's the wrong choice for workloads such as databases which expect the filesystem to essentially "pass through" the performance characteristics of the underlying block device.

> zfs is for when you want RAID and snapshots but are prepared to have it blow up every now and then.

> "professional Sysadmin"

btrfs is for when you want simple RAID (DON'T USE RAID5/6) and/or snapshots without he complexity of using zfs.

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