Hello Brothers. I am here to ask to clear myself about the BRTFS filesystem. Although this is a meaningless topic to discuss about. Actually i have lost two of my hard disk which is not working right now. Because this is happened when i am started BRTFS filesystem on my lost hard disk. I formatted my hard disk 500GB for cache storage for pacman. I keep getting confused is BTRFS file system break my hard disk or not ( Although this is a funny and useless so forgive me. ). One of my hard disk had 100% health, brought 4 years ago And other one is 14 years age and had 40% health.
So my question is BRTFS filesystem is better than ext4 or not?
Is there any rules that i should follow for using BRTFS file system?
Can i use NTFS file system for cache storage for Pacman?
I just want to clearfy myself. Because i am new to linux. Hope you all help me out. Thanks.
It isn’t better or worse. It is just different. btrfs offers many more features than ext4 at the cost of a small amount of performance. At the same time, btrfs is more reliable in some ways and less reliable in others.
There is one rule you should follow with every filesystem. Back up any data you don’t want to lose.
You shouldn’t. ntfs doesn’t support posix file permissions so it shouldn’t be used for anything except media storage in most cases.(Technically, you can make ntfs support posix but that is separate and advanced topic)
You should replace this drive if you can. If you can’t, be sure not to store any data on it you don’t want to lose.
A posix filessystem relates to how it tracks permissions. non-posix filesystems don’t support the way Linux stores permissions. It won’t cause corruption but you will not have proper permissions which may cause certain applications to not work.
So if i wanted to use NTFS file system as a cache storage for pacman with posix file permission. How can i do that? And if i done this is it make package corruption when my garuda system going for install. ( I used BRTFS filesystem for my Garuda Dragonized.) My Garuda Linux system Installed as dual boot with windows 10 in my NVME SSD. And i wanted to use my external Hard disk for cache storage by editing pacman.conf file under cachedir flag
Why are you trying to make your life harder by using NTFS for data that's only useful on a linux system?
Create a separate partition on the drive for that purpose.
As I stated above, this is an advanced concept and something not commonly done. If you want to attempt that, you need to be able to research and solve that on your own.
Yes. Btrfs reliable than ext4. It is easier to recover the data with it (in the event of a drive failure and other problems). Also supports subvolumes, raid and transparent compression. The speed of work is also higher. One minus. Fragmentation, because of this, you have to defragment the file system every few weeks.
If you have an HDD, then defragment every few weeks and enable the mount option autodefrag. If SSD, enable mount option -o ssd
I do not get the point of it. BTRFS in all parameters is better than NTFS.
Are you saying here that Btrfs is more reliable or as reliable?
That’s a tough claim to make given ext4 is very mature and Btrfs is still maturing. It’s only just starting to become standard for most OSes this year as it’s only now becoming sufficiently reliable, which means it still lags behind.
I prefer it over ext4 because it’s “good enough” on reliability and speed, with the feature set pushing it beyond ext4 for my use case, but it seems inaccurate to claim it’s as/more reliable or faster than ext4 (if they are your claims, the language was ambiguous, I assume because English isn’t native?!?)
btrfs reliability is a complicated topic. It has many features which make it more reliable than ext4. However, when corruption does occur, it can often be unrecoverable. Conversely, corruption is more likely to occur in ext4 but it can more often be fixed with a simple fsck.
I am not confident btrfs will get significantly more reliable than it is today. There haven’t been any serious reliability improvements in years.
btrfs has been in widely available for 12 years and was in development from longer ago than that.
btrfs has been standard in many places for much longer than this year. It has been default in suse for several years. It has been the default in Synology NAS devices for a very long time now.
I think the only major distro to make it default in the last year is Fedora.
This is just my opinion but Phoronix storage benchmarks shouldn’t be taken seriously in most cases. He doesn’t do any tuning or setup things in a meaningful way. He just installs and runs benchmarks.
For example, you shouldn’t run database benchmarks without doing the basic things any database admin would do…
Thank you for the somewhat (relatively speaking) nuanced responses.
In summation, we agree... it's complicated. Pros and cons, cons and pros.
Regarding the "this year", I mean it's been gaining adoption. Fedora (and .. some others I don't recall because it's of so little importance) bring it to nicely into the realm of "most".
I was used btrfs on OpenSUSE years ago. I did have some issues, but I always had issues back then as I was far more gungho and reckless.
I guess garuda enable SSD fstrim by default. Is it similar doing mount option -o and fstrim. And how do i do defragment. Should i use autodefrag flag using gnome-disk-utility so that i do not edit fstab manually?
Do not enable autodefrag, if you use SSD. The file system itself detects which drive. But not always right. For example, I have BTRFS counted Raid from SAS drives on the Adaptec controller for SSD.
