#btrfs

[lemon-tt-01]

lets install Arch Linux with mama

[amwult]

[btrfs-unofficial]

so, btrfs lets you compress your data, right? but what level of compression should you use?

i did some testing to find this out, comparing speed and space savings of different levels of zstd compression

but in short: you should use compress=zstd

more details under the cut

compression

the way i did this was by creating 4 virtual disk images, one with each of the following mount options: compress=zstd, compress-force=zstd, compress=zstd:10, and compress-force=zstd:10. i then copied the same files to each one and checked data saving with compsize

results: the difference in compression between zstd and zstd:10 was negligible. the difference between using compress and compress-force was present, but it only helped with binaries and some videogames

most of the data in your drives is already compressed! and for anything that isnt, btrfs is pretty good at figuring out if it should compress it or not

speed

this was measured with KDiskMark, by testing the speeds of one of my SSD's while mounted with different compression options. these were: compress=no, compress=zstd, compress-force=zstd and compress-force=zstd:10

with my computer at idle:

compression gave better write speeds, but forcing it diminished this due to wasted cpu cycles

compress=zstd gave faster random read speeds

everything else was the same

with my computer under load:

in order to check how compression performs while the cpu is under load, i disabled 6 of my 8 threads and used stress-ng to stress the remaining 2

in this case compression gave worse sequential writes, but not by much

also slightly better sequential reads

random reads were way worse with compression

conclusion

you should use compress=zstd. it performs better with everything, unless writing under heavy loads. if you have a bad cpu then you may consider not using compression

i did not test zlib since zstd is better, and also i relied on KDiskMark results which may not be the most reliable, so take this with a grain of salt

[kde-plasma-official]

I am now running on @btrfs-unofficial

[vaartis]

If it's called "better fs" for a reason, then why did they name ZFS what they did and why it is better than the so-called "better fs"

[raspbian-official]

thank you gparted for crashing during a resize and breaking this btrfs partition. nothing on here was irreplacable, but i would like it back please. filesystem tumblr help all the recovery tools are complaining about checksum errors and bad tree blocks

[nixcraft]

I have been using Btrfs for several months, and it has been stable enough for me. It is a file system that can be used as a storage driver for Linux containers like LXD, Incus, or Docker. If you want to install Btrfs support on Debian Linux and format & mount a disk drive, see my tutorial

How to install BTRFS on a Debian Linux 12/11

This guide explains how to install BTRFS on Debian Linux 11/12 & setting up a new block storage filesystem on an existing Debian installatio

[mirqmarq428]

The theory's sound, but to butter my fs right it needs to be reformatted.

Thankfully the data almost fits on my other hard drives. Almost. Splitting it now