A Quick Look At EXT4 vs. ZFS Performance On Ubuntu 19.10 With An NVMe SSD

[nikodll]

It would made a more fair comparison when some features were enabled for both systems. E.g. ZFS + native encryption vs. EXT4 + LUKS.

[pkese]

ZFS is among the fastest filesystems, and probably beats XFS is every category.

... except that benchmarks prove you wrong.

[carewolf]

Mostly agree. Though EXT4, LVM and MD RAID does not protect or detect bit rot. So if your data is valuable... Btrfs or ZFS is the way to go. Backups do not help against bit rot since you usually don't detect them before the rot is copied into the backups.

BTRFS will just eat all your data instead of a single file if it hits bitrot in its metadata. Not really an improvement.

[carewolf]

XFS always worked well for me... plain, simple and fast... ZFS looks cool but with a very big performance penalty for now...

ZFS is among the fastest filesystems, and probably beats XFS is every category. Ext4 is just top dog.

[johnc]

Quite frankly am I the only one who doesn't share this fascination with ZFS? Its performance is absolutely dreadful, its integration into Linux shaky at best (both technically and licence-wise) and we don't even have any figures of its impact on battery autonomy, which I imagine will be major. Sure, CoW is a desirable feature but we already have it in byrfs which, for all its own flaws, is a better and more capable design and I wish efforts were spent on giving it the one feature it's missing, namely subvolume encryption, rather than importing this hodgepodge of enterprisey bloatware.

It has its uses. The people working on ZFS want it for their use cases, so that's why there is work being done there. If people wanted btrfs, they would be working on that.

[jacob]

Quite frankly am I the only one who doesn't share this fascination with ZFS? Its performance is absolutely dreadful, its integration into Linux shaky at best (both technically and licence-wise) and we don't even have any figures of its impact on battery autonomy, which I imagine will be major. Sure, CoW is a desirable feature but we already have it in byrfs which, for all its own flaws, is a better and more capable design and I wish efforts were spent on giving it the one feature it's missing, namely subvolume encryption, rather than importing this hodgepodge of enterprisey bloatware.

[cjcox]

No. Not really.

AFAIK ReFS does periodic scrubbing as its technique.

[S.Pam]

But is periodic "scrubbing" a "good" answer? Maybe it's "good enough"? Most RAID subsystems do periodic scrubbing.

No. Not really.

[cjcox]

I personally do lots of photography and can say from experience that bitrot is real. It's not only Btrfs but also ZFS and on Windows ReFS that can protect against it.

Some reading if you like: https://arstechnica.com/information-...n-filesystems/

But is periodic "scrubbing" a "good" answer? Maybe it's "good enough"? Most RAID subsystems do periodic scrubbing.

[smartalgorithm]

On SSD's too? 'Cause I'm still using ext4, but I consider switching to XFS on my next reinstall (unless there are conversion tools to do it right now?) if it's also fit for SSD's.

yes, switched to it for SSD's...