[Discuss] ZFS On Linux "in" Debian, migration from Btrfs

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 01:39:51PM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Please share your experiences with both BTRFS and ZFS.


I use btrfs in RAID 1 and RAID 10 mode on spinning disks, RAID 1 on ssd,
zfs in RAID 10 on spinning disks with independent ZIL and L2ARC (read
and write caches) on ssd, and in RAID 1 on ssd.

btrfs is a little faster, but the only time this makes a
significant difference is in weekly scrubbing, where btrfs does
it at about twice the rate of zfs.

btrfs has a nocow option that can be set on directories or
individual files which can dramatically improve performance for
databases and VM images. But... that also turns off
checksumming, which is one of the big reasons to use zfs or
btrfs in the first place. It also turns off compression.

zfs does not have a nocow option at all. If you are running a
production database, zfs is not your friend for the database
storage.

zfs has better tools for snapshotting.

zfs is generally more flexible about turning options on and
off... except for deduplication. Do not experiment with
deduplication. zfs has many, many options.

Both support rsync-like incremental send and receive functions,
nearly instantaneous snapshotting. and compression with a couple
of algorithms. 

-dsr-