On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Mick <[email protected]> wrote: > > Thanks Rich, I have been reading your posts about btrfs with interest, but > have not yet used it on my systems. Is btrfs agreeable with SSDs, or should I > be using f2fs: >
Btrfs will auto-detect SSDs and optimize itself differently, and is generally considered to be fine on SSDs. Of course, btrfs itself is experimental and may eat your data, especially if you get it too full, but you'll be no worse off for running it on an SSD. I doubt you'll find any general-purpose filesystem that works as well overall on an SSD as something like f2fs as this is log-based and designed with SSDs in mind. However, f2fs is also very immature and also carries risks, and the last time I checked it was missing some features like xattrs as well. It also doesn't have anything like btrfs send to serialize your data. zfs on linux might be another option. I don't know how well it handles SSDs in general, and you have to fuss with FUSE and a boot partition as I don't think grub supports it - it could be a bit of a PITA for a single-drive system. However, it is probably more mature than btrfs overall, and it certainly supports send. I just had a btrfs near-miss which caused me to rethink how I'm managing my own storage. I was half-tempted to blog on it - it is a bit frustrating as I believe we're right in the middle of the shift between the traditional filesystems and the next-generation ones. Sticking with the old means giving up a lot of potential benefits, but there are a lot of issues with jumping ship as well as the new systems all lack maturity or are not feature-complete yet. I was looking at f2fs, btrfs, and zfs again this weekend and the issues I struggle with are the immaturity of btrfs and f2fs, the lack of working parity raid on btrfs, the lack of many features on f2fs, and the inability to resize vdevs on zfs which means on a system with few drives you get locked in. I suspect all of those will change in time, but not yet! -- Rich
