this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Using it here. Love the flexibility and features.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Meh. I run proxmox and other boot drives on ext4, data drives on xfs. I don't have any need for additional features in btrfs. Shrinking would be nice, so maybe someday I'll use ext4 for data too.

I started with zfs instead of RAID, but I found I spent way too much time trying to manage RAM and tuning it, whereas I could just configure RAID 10 once and be done with it. The performance differences are insignificant, since most of the work it does happens in the background.

You can benchmark them if you care about performance. You can find plenty of discussion by googling "ext vs xfs vs btrfs" or whichever ones you're considering. They haven't changed that much in the past few years.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

but I found I spent way too much time trying to manage RAM and tuning it,

I spent none, and it works fine. what was your issue?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I have four 6tb data drives and 32gb of RAM. When I set them up with zfs, it claimed quite a few gb of RAM for its cache. I tried allocating some of the other NVMe drive as cache, and tried to reduce RAM usage to reasonable levels, but like I said, I found that I was spending a lot of time fiddling instead of just configuring RAID and have it running just fine in much less time.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Proxmox only supports btrfs or ZFS for raid

Or at least that's what I thought

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (3 children)
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[–] SendMePhotos 2 points 1 month ago

I run it now because I wanted to try it. I haven't had any issues. A friend recommended it as a stable option.

[–] horse_battery_staple 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Do you rely on snapshotting and journaling? If so backup your snapshots.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Btrfs only has issues with raid 5. Works well for raid 1 and 0. No reason to change if it works for you

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

It is stable with raid 0,1 and 10.

Raid 5 and 6 are dangerous

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I think it has more issues than just with raid 5 &6!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I am using btrfs on raid1 for a few years now and no major issue.

It's a bit annoying that a system with a degraded raid doesn't boot up without manual intervention though.

Also, not sure why but I recently broke a system installation on btrfs by taking out the drive and accessing it (and writing to it) from another PC via an USB adapter. But I guess that is not a common scenario.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

The whole point of RAID redundancy is uptime. The fact that btrfs doesn't boot with a degraded disk is utterly ridiculous and speaks volumes of the developers.

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