Sorry but this article is factually wrong in so many ways. It reads as someone wants to share his own experiences based on a not well researched background and wrote this down then.
The only valid point is that btrfs is natively integrated into Linux, all other points are either demonstrably wrong, blown out of proportion or usage opinions.
I think people have forgotten what the point of a NAS is. Its for storage. You put files on it and don’t ask it to do much else. You want it to be quick so it can efficiently serve files to other machines. ZFS is a solid choice for this use-case.
It might not be built-in to the kernel, but if it wasn’t for the openZFS licence it probably would have been. And its not like its hard to install it.
I agree that ZFS is a solid choice for that, but so it btrfs, which has basically all of the important features of ZFS, but is significantly easier to use and built into the Kernel.
ZFS doesn’t require more RAM (or at least not meaningfully more), it just uses it if you have it. The RAM/ARC can be turned down in the configuration if you don’t want it to do that. I think on Linux other filesystems just use the native Linux RAM cache instead(?), so it’s basically the same thing as ARC, just less prominent? Also, doesn’t ZFS have RAIDZ expansion now? Actually a lot of this article smells funny… probably because they just happen to know more about BTRFS. Doesn’t BTRFS still have the RAID5/6 write hole? I wonder what sort of setup they’re using if they’re running it on a NAS.
Yeah btrfs maintainers still recommend against RAID5/6. You can sort of get around that by doing it via lvm and formatting that with btrfs, but I’d rather do it with native file system support. Fewer moving parts, as it were.
My own decision tree for these sorts of things is simple: are all the drives in the array the same? If so, zfs; if not, btrfs. Energy efficiency would come into play for spinning rust or arrays of sufficient size, but the “identical or not” question has served me well for years.
Also, doesn’t ZFS have RAIDZ expansion now?
Yep, it has for a year now, and it’s surprisingly easy to do.
Can confirm. I upgraded from a 6-bay to an 8-bay enclosure and added two more drives without issue.
doesn’t ZFS have RAIDZ expansion now
He didn’t claim it didn’t.
“Even basic tasks like adding drives and changing pool size take a bit of tinkering.”
His claim is it is harder to do.
I was looking at point #3 from the article, which is more misleading in this area than point #5.
Leaving RAM cache to be managed by the kernel has some benefits, especially on low end devices, which is what the article talks about.
The comment section was pretty entertaining.
Yeah, the typical uninformed FUD with anecdotes of btrfs failing them 15 years ago when they did something that was explicitly marked as experimental 🤦
For every person that complains about btrfs, there are 10 that have been using it since many years with absolutely no issues what so ever.
