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?
Been using BTRFS for all disks and purposes for a few years, I would recommend it with the requirement that you research it first. There are things you should know, like how/when to disable CoW, how to manage snapshots, how to measure filesystem use, and what the risks/purposes of the various btrfs operations are. If you know enough to avoid doing something bad with it, it’s very unlikely to break on you.
Huh. I just realized the problem with “don’t use upvotes to show agreement.” It means encouraging low-effort “me-too” posts.
I don’t have much to add to your comment, just… me too.
Me too!
ext4 works perfectly fine for me and most people.
Ext4 is all I use, except for boot partitions that require different filesystems.
ext4 being old, and still being the main file system most distros use by default, should be enough alone to tell you being old isnt bad.
it means its battle tested, robust, stable, and safe. Otherwise it wouldnt be old and still be in widespread use.
i would generally recommend XFS over ext4 for anything where a CoW filesystem isn’t needed. in my experience, it performs better than ext4 at most workloads, and still supports some nifty features like reflink copies if you want them.
This is exactly my outlook. Ext4 has proven itself as a robust and reliable file system.
Currently running BTRFS. Next fs is gonna be ext4. No need for anything else
Are you saying you don’t like btrfs?
btrfs is great for system stability because of snapshots. You can set it up to automatically make snapshots at a timed interval or every time you run pacman.
If something breaks, you can just revert to a previous snapshot. You can even do this from grub. It’s a bit hard to set up, so if you want, you could use an arch based distro which automatically sets it up like GarudaOS.
Too bad btrfs still doesn’t support encryption natively, unlike ext4.
How much is ext4 filesystem-level encryption actually used though?
I guess not much on desktop Linux, but every Android phone uses it. Really wish every Linux desktop would start encrypting their /home partition by default, which is the standard by many other operating systems.
Wow, first time I’ve seen GarudaOS recommended by someone who’s not me. Awesome distro, daily driver on my gaming rig.
Or OpenSUSE , all setup out of the box for btrfs, snapshots, grub rollback, and cleanup timers, etc.
I use btrfs because I like it’s features and I would love to see native encryption on it. I would use zfs if it’s license was GPL.
GPL or GTFO gang
Thank you
Most people should use ext4. Only use something else if you want to tinker and don’t need long term data storage.
I’m using btrfs for my desktop and laptop (and its snapshots have saved me a couple of times), and ZFS for my NAS and router. Both seem pretty robust.
ext4 is perfectly fine for my needs. It’s stable and just works.
Ext4 is old, but fast and very robust. You won’t loose data or corrupt the filesystem if your system looses power. It can even survive partial wipes, if you accidentally overwrite the first few megs of you drive with a messed up dd, nearly all your data will be recoverable, including filenames and directory structure.
It doesn’t have very fancy features, but it is the best tested and most robust option available. (also the fastest due to its simplicity)
Btrfs has things like copy on write files that can protect you from an accidental rm, but this won’t save you from drive failures, so you still need backups for important data.
You won’t loose data or corrupt the filesystem if your system looses power.
Some secondary storage devices ignore standards and outright lie about sectors being successfully written when they are actually scheduled to be written out of order. This causes obvious problems when power failure prevents the true writes from completing. Nothing can be guaranteed for such drives.
O use ext4 at home and in servers that are not SLES HANA DB ones.
On SLES HANA servers I use ext4 for everything but the database partitions, for which SAP and SUSE support and recommend XFS.
In a few occasions people left the non-db partitions as the default on SUSE install, btrfs, with default settings. That turned out to cause unnecessary disk and processor usage.
I would be ashamed of justifying btrfs on a server for the possibility of undoing “broken things”. Maybe in a distro hopping, system tinkering, unstable release home computer, but not in a server. You don’t play around in a server to “break things” that often. Linux (differently from Windows) servers don’t break themselves at the software level. For hardware breakages, there’s RAID, backups, and HA reduntant systems, because if it’s a hardware issue btrfs isn’t going to save you - even if you get back that corrupted file, you won’t keep running in that hardware, nor trust that “this” was the only and last file it corrupted.
EDIT: somewhat offtopic: I never use LVM. Call me paranoid and old fashioned, but I really prefer knowing where my data is, whole.
Facebook was using btrfs for some usecases. Not sure what you mean by breaking things?
Most comments suggesting btrfs were justifying it for the possibility of rolling back to a previous state of files when something breaks (not a btrfs breakage, but mishaps on the system requiring an “undo”).
Ah, I see. While that use may be a good plan for home server, doing that for production server seems like a bandaid solution to having a test server and controlling deployed changes very carefully.
Exactly. A waste of server resources, as a productions server is not tinkerable, and shouldn’t “break”.
ext4.
Never used arch; just slackware and then enterprise linux.
Ext4 for general pupose linux. Zfs for bsd network drives
oh I just read up on this last knight. Yes ext4 is old but it is used because it is still works quite well. btrfs, dis anyone say that as butfarts, can handle much larger partitions ext4 maxes out at a few tb while btfrs can get much larger. ZFS can handle a around a billion tb but it needs a lot more resources to to even start
ext4 is good enough.
