Hello everyone. I’m going to build a new PC soon and I’m trying to maximize its reliability all I can. I’m using Debian Bookworm. I have a 1TB M2 SSD to boot on and a 4TB SATA SSD for storage. My goal is for the computer to last at least 10 years. It’s for personal use and work, playing games, making games, programming, drawing, 3d modelling etc.

I’ve been reading on filesystems and it seems like the best ones to preserve data if anything is lost or corrupted or went through a power outage are BTRFS and ZFS. However I’ve also read they have stability issues, unlike Ext4. It seems like a tradeoff then?

I’ve read that most of BTRFS’s stability issues come from trying to do RAID5/6 on it, which I’ll never do. Is everything else good enough? ZFS’s stability issues seem to mostly come from it having out-of-tree kernel modules, but how much of a problem is this in real-life use?

So far I’ve been thinking of using BTRFS for the boot drive and ZFS for the storage drive. But maybe it’s better to use BTRFS for both? I’ll of course keep backups but I would still like to ensure I’ll have to deal with stuff breaking as little as possible.

Thank you in advance for the advice.

  • Andy3153
    4·
    1 year ago

    It’s gonna be a hard decision to make. I know that because I read about Btrfs for about a whole week before deciding to switch to it. But, I’m a happy Btrfs user now for about 8 months, and I’ll be honest with you, in my opinion, if your application does not mainly involve small random writes that’ll make Btrfs inevitably fragment a ton, it is most likely good for any situation. I don’t know much about the other modern/advanced filesystems like ZFS or XFS to tell you anything about them though