About a year ago I switched to ZFS for Proxmox so that I wouldn’t be running technology preview.

Btrfs gave me no issues for years and I even replaced a dying disk with no issues. I use raid 1 for my Proxmox machines. Anyway I moved to ZFS and it has been a less that ideal experience. The separate kernel modules mean that I can’t downgrade the kernel plus the performance on my hardware is abysmal. I get only like 50-100mb/s vs the several hundred I would get with btrfs.

Any reason I shouldn’t go back to btrfs? There seems to be a community fear of btrfs eating data or having unexplainable errors. That is sad to hear as btrfs has had lots of time to mature in the last 8 years. I would never have considered it 5-6 years ago but now it seems like a solid choice.

Anyone else pondering or using btrfs? It seems like a solid choice.

  • cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Don’t use btrfs if you need RAID 5 or 6.

    The RAID56 feature provides striping and parity over several devices, same as the traditional RAID5/6. There are some implementation and design deficiencies that make it unreliable for some corner cases and the feature should not be used in production, only for evaluation or testing. The power failure safety for metadata with RAID56 is not 100%.

    https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#raid56-status-and-recommended-practices

  • vividspecter@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    No reason not to. Old reputations die hard, but it’s been many many years since I’ve had an issue.

    I like also that btrfs is a lot more flexible than ZFS which is pretty strict about the size and number of disks, whereas you can upgrade a btrfs array ad hoc.

    I’ll add to avoid RAID5/6 as that is still not considered safe, but you mentioned RAID1 which has no issues.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      What’s up is ZFS. It is solid but the architecture is very dated at this point.

      There are about a hundred different settings I could try to change but at some point it is easier to go btrfs where it works out of the box.

      • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        You’ve been downvoted, but I’ve seen a fair share of ZFS implementations confirm your assessment.

        E.g. “Don’t use ZFS if you care about performance, especially on SSD” is a fairly common refrain in response to anyone asking about how to get the best performance out of their solution.