What filesystem is currently best for a single nvme drive with regard to performance read/write as well as stability/no file loss? ext4 seems very old, btrfs is used by RHEL, ZFS seems to be quite good… what do people tend to use nowadays? What is an arch users go-to filesystem?

  • AnanaceA
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    1 year ago

    We’re moving towards more btrfs - or at least LVM+<other FS> where there’s no btrfs support - on as much of our server fleet as we can, since the lack of snapshotting on the other filesystems is making consistent backups way too expensive resource- and time-wise.
    With LVM it’s at least possible to take a block-level snapshot - which is really inefficient compared to a file-level snapshot, but it at least provides a stable point for backups to run from, without having to pause all writes during the backup or risk running out a sliding window if allowing writes to continue.

    For a home user (especially one who’s not as well versed in Linux or don’t have tinkering time), I’d personally suggest either ext4 - since it’s been the default for a while and therefore often what’s assumed in guides, or btrfs where distros include it as a default option - since they should be configured with snapshots out of the box in that case, which make it much harder for the system to break due to things like unexpected shutdowns while running updates.

    I’d personally stay away from ZFS for any important data storage on home computers, since it’s officially not supported, and basically guaranteed never to be either due to licensing. It can remain a reasonable option if you have the know-how - or at least the tinkering time to gain said know-how, but it’s probably going to be suboptimal for desktop usage regardless.

    • pressanykeynow@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      1 year ago

      I find btrfs pretty good for desktop use mostly due to convenience it offers with managing devices(adding new device or migrating data is trivial and does not need any downtime) and subvolumes(different mount options or excluding some data from snapshots).