[CentOS] Btrfs going forward, was: Errors on an SSD drive

[hw]

Mark Haney wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Chris Murphy <lists at 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.