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?

  • tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk
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    1 year ago

    It really depends on your priorities. Single drive is good for a home system with nothing really important on it… once you get to wanting to keep it and where recovery from backups is too much downtime, you want at least a drive mirror… nothing wrong with exr4+mdraid for that, although you don’t get the checksumming that zfs gives it will be pretty fast & if a drive fails you can run degraded on one drive until you get the new drive in.

    I’ve been running zfs for 10 years and not lost a single byte of data even after doing stupid shit like tripping over the sata cables and disconnecting half the drives. It’s survived multiple drive failures (as long as the failures are on different bits of the disk, it recover get a clean copy onto a third drive, but it’s a brown trousers moment when stuff like that happens).

    Downsides, it aint fast, and it does tend to like lots of memory. You want it on your fileserver, not your gaming system.

    IMO there’s no point in a single drive zfs… it’ll warn you faster that the drive is f*cked but what do you do then?

    • Bread@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I agree. Love ZFS for the NAS, but for a single drive desktop system, it is almost pointless and in my experience slower for desktop usage. ZFS is great for what it was designed for.