64
Tell me why I shouldn't use btrfs
(lemmy.zip)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
64 points (93.2% liked)
Selfhosted
40329 readers
415 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Don't use btrfs if you need RAID 5 or 6.
https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#raid56-status-and-recommended-practices
I have no problem running it with raid 5/6. The important thing is to have a UPS.
I've been running a btrfs storage array with data on raid5 and metadata I believe raid1 for the last 5 or so years and have yet to have a problem because of it. I did unfortunately learn not to fully trust the windows btrfs driver but was fortunately able to restore from backups and redownloading.
I wouldn't hesitate to set it up again for myself or anybody else, and adding a UPS would be icing on the cake. (I added UPS to my setup this last summer)
I've got raid 6 at the base level and LVM for partitioning and ext4 filesystem for a k8s setup. Based on this, btrfs doesn't provide me with any advantages that I don't already have at a lower level.
Additionaly, for my system, btrfs uses more bits per file or something such that I was running out of disk space vs ext4. Yeah, I can go buy more disks, but I like to think that I'm running at peak efficiency, using all the bits, with no waste.
Well yeah, because it's supposed to replace those lower levels.
Also, BTRFS does provide advantages over ext4, such as snapshots, which I think are fantastic since I can recover if things go sideways. I don't know what your use-case is, so I don't know if the features BTRFS provides would be valuable to you.
Or run the raid 5 or 6 separately, with hardware raid or mdadm
Even for simple mirroring there's an argument to be made for running it separately from btrfs using mdadm. You do lose the benefit of btrfs being able to automatically pick the valid copy on localised corruption, but the admin tools are easier to use and more proven in a case of full disk failure, and if you run an encrypted block device you need to encrypt half as much stuff.