Hello everyone. I’m going to build a new PC soon and I’m trying to maximize its reliability all I can. I’m using Debian Bookworm. I have a 1TB M2 SSD to boot on and a 4TB SATA SSD for storage. My goal is for the computer to last at least 10 years. It’s for personal use and work, playing games, making games, programming, drawing, 3d modelling etc.

I’ve been reading on filesystems and it seems like the best ones to preserve data if anything is lost or corrupted or went through a power outage are BTRFS and ZFS. However I’ve also read they have stability issues, unlike Ext4. It seems like a tradeoff then?

I’ve read that most of BTRFS’s stability issues come from trying to do RAID5/6 on it, which I’ll never do. Is everything else good enough? ZFS’s stability issues seem to mostly come from it having out-of-tree kernel modules, but how much of a problem is this in real-life use?

So far I’ve been thinking of using BTRFS for the boot drive and ZFS for the storage drive. But maybe it’s better to use BTRFS for both? I’ll of course keep backups but I would still like to ensure I’ll have to deal with stuff breaking as little as possible.

Thank you in advance for the advice.

  • TCB13@lemmy.world
    4·
    1 year ago

    BTRFS - easy, fast, reliable, snapshots, compression, usable RAID, CoW, online resizing… ZFS - hard to get into, reliable, snapshots, compression, state of the art RAID, CoW…

    Everything else, particularly Ext4 should be avoided. Your life will be a lot easier once you discover snapshotting and also how more robust and reliable BTRFS and ZFS are. I got into BTRFS a few years ago in order to survive power losses as I had issues with Ext3 and Ext4 regularly with that. My experience with Ext4 disks was always: if something goes slightly wrong your data is… puff gone.