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?

  • jsveiga
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Facebook was using btrfs for some usecases. Not sure what you mean by breaking things?

      • jsveiga
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        1 year ago

        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”).

        • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • jsveiga
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            1 year ago

            Exactly. A waste of server resources, as a productions server is not tinkerable, and shouldn’t “break”.