I want to learn more about file systems from the practical point of view so I know what to expect, how to approach them and what experience positive or negative you had / have.

I found this wikipedia’s comparison but I want your hands-on views.

For now my mental list is

  • NTFS - for some reason TVs on USB love these and also Windows + Linux can read and write this
  • Ext4 - solid fs with journaling but Linux specific
  • Btrfs - some modern fs with snapshot capability, Linux specific
  • xfs - servers really like these as they are performant, Linux specific
  • FAT32 - limited but recognizable everywhere
  • exFAT - like FAT32 but less recognizable and less limited
  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    3 months ago

    Btrfs isn’t stable in big configurations. The big issue is that resilvering takes a long time and hurts performance. ZFS is the right answer.

    • HarriPotero@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      3 months ago

      Linus says no.

      I’m sure it’s great and all, but the hassle of having a filesystem that’s not in the kernel is a no-starter for me. Maybe one of those fancy NAS-distros that are based on some *BSD.

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        3 months ago

        Linux works fine with ZFS. I wouldn’t use it as your boot device but for big storage it is very reliable and stable. It also can take advantage of ram with Arc and has optional special disks. (Metadata disk, slog and cache as an example)