2y ago

Btrfs is a great filesystem for proxmox in raid 1. Stop telling people not to use it

Btrfs gets a bad rap sometimes but I have been using it for years and it works very well. It is able to take failing hardware and power outages and still has good performance.

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For those without knowledge: Alternatives to BTRFS are what? EXT4 or NTFS?
- Mostly ZFS, XFS and ext4
- Correct, btrfs is a filesystem format.
  
  What are the alternatives to it? NTFS? EXT4? ExFAT? FAT32??
Yes BTRFS is really good and solid. Usually survives hardware failure much better than the EXT* crap. And sub volumes and snapshots, damn finally a modern filesystem.
Agreed, I switched over from OpenZFS to btrfs and while it does lack some more advanced features, using btrfs for raid1 disk pools has been a very solid and hassle free experience.
I've used Proxmox in the past w it, worked okie. One crazy hypervisor, ton of features. I mostly stick w VMware, it just works. My uptime is measured in years.
- Well I'll never get a uptime like they in proxmox cause I update.
- You can do the same thing with proxmox.
  The benefit of proxmox is that it is libre and uses Linux components.
To be honest, I don't see a benefit for btrfs (or zfs). I prefer plain ext4 (no LVM). It's simpler and faster. I have no need for snapshots. Proxmox handles my vms and my working machines are just a collection of dot files... But that's just me. It's good that there are choices.
- Ext4 is slower than btrfs
  
  It's been a while since I looked at benchmarks (https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.14-File-Systems). It could be these days.
It has been a while since I looked at it but does proxmox support HA replication using btrfs? From what I remember only zfs worked with those features.
- I don't know as I don't use that feature
My anecdotal experience with btrfs is that it constantly broke in raid 1, no problems with any other filesystems on the exact same hardware and setup. YMMV
- How long ago was that? Modern btrfs is pretty stable.
  
  Last year, unraid, identical SSDs. I changed so many sata and power cables, so many settings.
- I love it for single drives, but for RAID, ZFS all the way.
  
  ZFS also supports single drives, is there a reason to use btrfs instead?
Its supposed to be called betterFS but Jim Salter keeps calling it butter FS. Doesn't really inspire confidence. At least it's gonna need.. a better name
- I don't know who Jim is but I just call it butterfs
  
  Jim Salter, the former mod of r/zfs ? Former Ars Technica ? Currently in the ' 2.5 Admins' podcast?
  He's the hot knife of butter FS.

30 comments