General > General Technical Chat
Goodbye Windows, Hello Linux [advice needed for a Linux workstation at home]
OwO:
I'm looking at it from a purely practical point of view: ZFS and BTRFS are the only two filesystems on Linux that do data checksumming. If you ever encounter bit-rot (and you will because commodity HDDs are not reliable) the rest of the filesystems will silently corrupt your data without you having any way of knowing. md-raid, lvm, etc also have NO mechanism to detect bit-rot, and one bad drive in a RAID array WILL corrupt the entire array when data is read and written. I don't know why people still recommend putting your valuable data on ext4 or on a RAID array because you are going to be in for a nasty surprise. I've never used BSD or any variants (unless Mac OS counts) and not a ZFS fanboy of any sort, but I think Linux really lacks a good filesystem with proper multiple device support and have a good track record w.r.t data integrity (btrfs is almost there but not quite).
apis:
I believe modern drives have error correction codes built in, the disks will detect and correct bit errors by themselves. So bit rot is less of a problem than what the ZFS marketing says. The world managed without ZFS for a long time. That said, I don't mind the extra layer of data security and ZFS has many other nice features as well.
ruffy91:
According to my own experiences ZFS will have silent corruption due to bugs (they did in the last year) or if you don't use ECC Ram.
BTRFS won't have silent corruption, if something gets corrupted you will get errors and will be unable to ever recover the filesystem (for example hard shutdown -> corrupt FS and no recovery tool/fsck).
Just had a power outage and all my btrfs VMs are unusable now.
The VMs using ext4 I just did a fsck and it threw away the journal and it works again, but everything written in the last few seconds before the outage is lost now. Had to restore all the BTRFS VMs.
Conclusion: Use ZFS only if you follow all their recommendations (16 GB ECC Ram etc.) and do regular Scrubs.
Also if you use one of these filesystems you absolutely have to have good working backups. You will have to restore from backup every time there is corruption.
With BTRFS you will have to restore everything sometimes. Make sure you can do so in an acceptable timeframe.
technix:
Just throwing this out here: if you are okay with buying a second hand AMD RX 580 graphics card (should be around the US$100 mark now,) maybe put Hackintosh into consideration?
gnif:
--- Quote from: ruffy91 on January 25, 2019, 05:48:40 am ---According to my own experiences ZFS will have silent corruption due to bugs (they did in the last year) or if you don't use ECC Ram.
--- End quote ---
I couldn't agree more!, also note that if you have an overclocked CPU, no amount of EEC ram will save you from errors if your overclock isn't 100% stable. In short I would never run an overclocked system with ZFS, I have been burnt by this before.
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