Comments on: Ext4 vs. Btrfs: Why We’re Making The Switch [Linux]

By: Doc Mock

Doc Mock — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 22:12:49 +0000

I am required to do many benchmarks for work. Most of the bench marks include file system tests. Zfs is a big memory user. Even using it in a back end file storage device for NFS or FC results in poor performance. In order to get equivalent performance between the filesystems admins need to add mulitple SSD cache devices. On a local machine the responsiveness issues are masked by caching performed by the COW filesystem. Btrfs is about 35% faster in most filesystem benchmarks.

By: Charlie Gunz

Charlie Gunz — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 16:06:56 +0000

He may be talking about DeDupe. Now THAT’S what I call using a disk efficiently. if I have 17 seasons of South Park stored on a drive, and they all use the same video compression, chances are there will be tons of duplicated data, including parts of the same opening sequence over and over and over. even if those same parts of the video are not exactly the same, lots of that data will be. With DeDupe techniques, that data will be stored once. Much like compression.

By: survivalmonkey

survivalmonkey — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 02:50:56 +0000

Been using btrfs on a production laptop for about a year now. I have 3 subvolumes on 2 drives: / and /vm on drive #1 and /home on Drive #2.

As much as I love snapshots and all the rest of what btrfs brings to the party, I’m in the process of re OSing this machine and using ext4. I’ve never experienced corruption the system has degraded in performance to the point of being frustrating. I’ve had autodefrag set in fstab for random writes but I think that overall, the fs is defragmented to the point of beginning to trip over itself. Because of the placement of my vmware machines, I cannot perform the btrfs online defragmentation and this is something that I had not realized when I chose to experiment.

I love the concept and gave it my best shot, gaining new features with every new kernel but I have to, sadly, throw in the towel.

By: Ahmed Khalil

Ahmed Khalil — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 07:21:04 +0000

Linux steps is good but still very slow to win the war with windows and mac

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:52:51 +0000

I use BTRFS on the desktop, it’s terrible, and I am migrating back to ext4 (bit of a pain with 2TB of data). Huge huge huge IOWAITs all the time, sluggish desktop. Only using a 5400RPM disk for my /home, but it’s ridiculous the amount of times Linux completely blocks everything else for some stupid write, and then there are occasional panics from some btrfs codepath. This is on an 8GB RAM desktop.

Also, it’s unstable, with some bad luck, you can not fix it (no tools available yet).

The premise is of course great, I’d love to have ZFS also for my desktop. Since none of the Linux filesystems have proper end to end checkums or easy snapshots (not the LVM mess) I wouldn’t recommend it on a server either, at least not one with data you care about. Funny how people bitch about it here in the comments, it’s the ONLY serious filesystem for a server where you care about your data!

Also, NTFS is a very good filesystem, you have atomic transactions! All filesystems get fragmented, some faster than others due to their design (think FAT), some have external tools, some avoid it with hugely delayed writes, and some fix it in the background. ext3/4 are fine for desktop but no need for MS bashing, it’s not 1999 anymore.

By: Danny Stieben

Danny Stieben — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 07:59:22 +0000

Oh, nice pointer. I assume the same is with GRUB2, but I’m not sure. Safer to just assume it doesn’t though. :P

By: Danny Stieben

Danny Stieben — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 06:22:32 +0000

True; thank goodness I haven’t had to really attempt data recovery yet!

By: Danny Stieben

Danny Stieben — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 06:21:59 +0000

Really? What didn’t you like about it?

By: Danny Stieben

Danny Stieben — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 06:21:29 +0000

I’m not exactly what you mean by data being stored more efficiently…all file systems will use the available hard drive space. Any more is physically impossible. If you mean through compression, yes, btrfs can do that by itself.

By: Danny Stieben

Danny Stieben — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 06:19:55 +0000

That’s fine. No need to switch before the distros decide on it because right now btrfs is still technically unstable (although I’m running it…not terribly stable yet).

By: Danny Stieben

Danny Stieben — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 06:19:02 +0000

What would you need to use Windows for? Data sharing between OSes?

By: Benjamin Hodgetts

Benjamin Hodgetts — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 07:21:04 +0000

Careful with that. I was using BTRFS as the single partition on a drive and everything was fine until I enabled compression, at which point syslinux (the boot manager I was using) failed to load the kernel anymore as it doesn’t support BTRFS compression. I’m not sure about the state of GRUB2 in this regard.

By: mitchbw

mitchbw — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 05:52:34 +0000

would like to see better and more easy file recovery, in my experience ext 2 is my far easier to recover then ext4. and even then its no easy task.

By: Alex Livingstone

Alex Livingstone — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 21:37:53 +0000

I never really liked EXT4. I’ll be interested to see the changes in BTRFS

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 18:59:33 +0000

I’m just interested in whether the btrfs file system store data more efficiently than ext4. The best thing about Linux in my opinion is that it was one man’s desire to start from scratch using the available knowledge of computers at the time and implement the things in the root that MS had to do with additional features, add-ons, patches and upgrades.

Linux has always tried to keep things clean, small and efficient and going with that theme I would want the “better FS” to be cleaner, smaller, faster and more efficient with added flexibility that moving forward with a design brings with it. Such attributes would allow for more saved data on the same size hard drives.