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?
Ext4 being “old” shouldn’t put you off. It is demonstratively robust with a clear history of structure integrity. It has immense popularity and a good set of recovery tools and documentation. These are exactly what you are looking for in a filesystem.
I’m not saying EXT4 is the best for your requirements, just that age of a file system is like fine wine.
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.
This is exactly my outlook. Ext4 has proven itself as a robust and reliable file system.
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.
Or OpenSUSE , all setup out of the box for btrfs, snapshots, grub rollback, and cleanup timers, etc.
Wow, first time I’ve seen GarudaOS recommended by someone who’s not me. Awesome distro, daily driver on my gaming rig.
There are dozens of us. Dozens!
I use it for home and work! I quite like it though I miss latte dock still, dragging windows from the top bar was just so useful for me
ext4 works perfectly fine for me and most people.
If you’re married stay away from ReiserFS.
Ah, ReiserFS. I remember when it was the cool kid’s choice. Then with the murdering it went out of style. They were weird times.
It has been suggested by some that there is no relationship between Reiser murdering wives and ReiserFS murdering file systems, but most steer clear of both out of an abundance of caution.
Even now? I remember when it was new I tried it, must have been 20 or so years ago. Super fast for the time, but had a nack for randomly corrupting data. After the third reformat, I went back to ext2.
Hans Reiser murdered his wife.
Oh. I did not know that! I thought it was some vague reference to losing entire weekends fixing the corrupt data.
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.
Thank you
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 is all I use, except for boot partitions that require different filesystems.
Be conservative and use the simplest thing that supports your needs and don’t be suckered by feature lists. I have never needed more than ext4. It generally has the best all round performance and maturity is never a bad thing when it comes to filesystems. It isn’t most suitable for some embedded and enterprise environments and if you are working with those you generally know the various tradeoffs.
Btrfs or xfs. Sometimes ext4.
ITT 5 answers by 4 people
I run ext4 inside lvm (inside luks)
If you are planning to have any kind of database with regular random writes, stay away from btrfs. It’s roughly 4-5x slower than zfs and will slowly fragment itself to death.
I’m migrating a server from btrfs to zfs right now for this very reason. I have multiple large MySQL and SQLite tables on it and they have accumulated >100k file fragments each and have become abysmally slow. There are lots of benchmarks out there that show that zfs does not have this issue and even when both filesystems are clean, database performance is significantly higher on zfs.
If you don’t want a COW filesystem, then XFS on LVM raid for databases or ext4 on LVM for everything else is probably fine.
Did you disable CoW for your database with btrfs? E.g. for PostgreSQL, the Arch Wiki states:
If the database resides on a Btrfs file system, you should consider disabling Copy-on-Write for the directory before creating any database.
From arch wiki:
Disabling CoW in Btrfs also disables checksums. Btrfs will not be able to detect corrupted nodatacow files. When combined with RAID 1, power outages or other sources of corruption can cause the data to become out of sync.
No thanks
If you don’t want a COW filesystem, then XFS on LVM
XFS supports reflinks, so it’s kind of snapshot and CoW capable. Someone was working on some tool to make snapshots on XFS by utilizing reflinks.
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.
ext4 is good enough.
