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altgans | 4 years ago

Can you elaborate a bit more on why ZFS is great? I am currently thinking about doing "one final install" for my system, and am undecided between BTRFS and ZFS.

I noticed that most "hip" people use ZFS, but based on my meager research it seems actually recommended and designed for "big" data-center setups.

Why is ZFS good for small PC setups?

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If am being honest I just want something that works reliably, is easy to extend and doesn't require maintenance. Maybe ext4 is good enough?

discuss

pxc|4 years ago

If you have a single disk, BTRFS is probably as good as ZFS for you.

ZFS is mature and featureful, and it's easy to performance tune specific subdirectories using 'datasets' (on BTRFS you can do some of the same stuff with 'subvolumes'). It has good utilities for backup, including over the network. It always supports up to date, efficient compression (these days, zstd). It's good at pooling, so you don't need LVM if you want to be flexible about 'partitioning'.

One genuine advantage it has over BTRFS other than stable softraid support is that it's cross-platform among Unices, including (in incipient form) even macOS. So experience you gain in administering it would be transferable that way. (OTOH, Windows has a pretty mature BTRFS driver, but ZFS on Windows is even more recent (and difficult) an effort than ZFS on Mac).

Truthfully, ext4, BTRFS, and ZFS are all fast and stable, and once you set them up your filesystem, you'll probably hardly think about it. (If you go with ext4, I'd set it up on LVM to make it easier to extend or 'repartition' in case you wanna structure things differently or add another distro or whatever.)

Linux's heritage and continued use as a server OS makes it rich with fast, reliable, flexible, feature-complete filesystems. All three of your options here are better than what's on offer on any Windows or Mac desktop, so you kinda can't go wrong, so don't overthink it. Just pick something you feel like learning or whose documentation strikes you as agreeable and interesting. Whatever you choose will serve you fine until your disk dies or you get bored. :)