Why I recommend Btrfs over ZFS for most users

[pid1]

If you've been in the Linux community for any time, you no doubt have heard about ZFS and Btrfs and seen a flame war or two whenever one comes up. I expect no difference here, but I will offer my input as a long time user of both. The license argument is pointless, and I won't touch on that.

I've used Btrfs since before it was mainlined. I saw it discussed in a Gentoo Linux forum post and decided to give it a try. As a Gentoo user at the time, it was great for the simple role I used it for - the Portage directory. From then on I started using it more and more. Shortly after it was mainlined into the Linux kernel, I started using Btrfs as my filesystem of choice for NAS storage and rootfs on my desktop.

With over 12 years of use, I have never experienced data loss or corruption despite blatant disregard to warnings from the nay-sayers. I had several drives die with occasional errors or all of a sudden and every time I was able to fully recover a Btrfs "RAID5" volume of 6-9 disks. I have been running the same Btrfs volume in a NAS server for 4 years. I've replaced every drive, upgrading over time from 4TB to 8TB drives. This is where ZFS becomes a pain (although this is being fixed in the latest OpenZFS version shortly).

Btrfs and various RAID levels work just fine with different sized disks. I can add an 8TB drive to a RAID5 array of 4TB drives, resize the volume, rebalance, and all available space will be available. ZFS and mdraid does not have this ability.

Both Btrfs and ZFS are good filesystems, but I find Btrfs to be much more useful in most server and desktop/laptop roles.

*If you want the best ZFS experience, I recommend FreeBSD (or derivative, e.g. TrueNAS) over any Linux distro. FreeBSD's level of ZFS implementation is superior than on Linux.