Mark Haney wrote:
On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Chris Murphy lists@colorremedies.com wrote:
Changing the subject since this is rather Btrfs specific now.
Sounds like a hardware problem. Btrfs is explicitly optimized for SSD,
the
maintainers worked for FusionIO for several years of its development. If the drive is silently corrupting data, Btrfs will pretty much
immediately
start complaining where other filesystems will continue. Bad RAM can
also
result in scary warnings where you don't with other filesytems. And I've been using it in numerous SSDs for years and NVMe for a year with zero problems.
LMFAO. Trust me, I tried several SSDs with BTRFS over the last couple of years and had trouble the entire time. I constantly had to scrub the drive, had freezes under moderate load and general nastiness. If that's 'optimized for SSDs', then something is very wrong with the definition of optimized. Not to mention the fact that BTRFS is not production ready for anything, and I'm done trying to use it and going with XFS or EXT4 depending on my need.
As for a hardware problem, the drives were ones purchased in Lenovo professional workstation laptops, and, while you do get lemons occasionally, I tried 4 different ones of the exact same model and had the exact same issues. Its highly unlikely I'd get 4 of the same brand to have hardware issues. Once I went back to ext4 on those systems I could run the devil out of them and not see any freezes under even heavy load, nor any other hardware related items. In fact, the one I used at my last job was given to me on my way out and it's now being used by my daughter. It's been upgraded from Fedora 23 to 26 without a hitch. On ext4. Say what you want, BTRFS is a very bad filesystem in my experience.
What´s the alternative? Hardware RAID with SSDs not particularly designed for this application is a bad idea. Software RAID with mdadm is a bad idea because it comes with quite some performance loss. ZFS is troublesome because it´s not as well integrated as we can wish for, booting from a ZFS volume gives you even more trouble, and it is rather noticeable that ZFS wasn´t designed with performance in mind.
That doesn´t even mention features like checksumming, deduplication, compression and the creation of subvolumes (or their equivalent). It also doesn´t mention that LVM is a catastrophy.
I could use hardware RAID, but neither XFS, nor ext4 offer the required features.
So what should I use instead of btrfs or ZFS? I went with btrfs because it´s less troublesome than ZFS and provides features for which I don´t know any good alternative. So far, it´s working fine, but I´d rather switch now than experience desaster.