Re: [gentoo-user] Safeguarding strategies against SSD data loss

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 11:22 AM, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks Rich, I have been reading your posts about btrfs with interest, but
> have not yet used it on my systems.  Is btrfs agreeable with SSDs, or should I
> be using f2fs:
>

Btrfs will auto-detect SSDs and optimize itself differently, and is
generally considered to be fine on SSDs.  Of course, btrfs itself is
experimental and may eat your data, especially if you get it too full,
but you'll be no worse off for running it on an SSD.

I doubt you'll find any general-purpose filesystem that works as well
overall on an SSD as something like f2fs as this is log-based and
designed with SSDs in mind.  However, f2fs is also very immature and
also carries risks, and the last time I checked it was missing some
features like xattrs as well.  It also doesn't have anything like
btrfs send to serialize your data.

zfs on linux might be another option.  I don't know how well it
handles SSDs in general, and you have to fuss with FUSE and a boot
partition as I don't think grub supports it - it could be a bit of a
PITA for a single-drive system.  However, it is probably more mature
than btrfs overall, and it certainly supports send.

I just had a btrfs near-miss which caused me to rethink how I'm
managing my own storage.  I was half-tempted to blog on it - it is a
bit frustrating as I believe we're right in the middle of the shift
between the traditional filesystems and the next-generation ones.
Sticking with the old means giving up a lot of potential benefits, but
there are a lot of issues with jumping ship as well as the new systems
all lack maturity or are not feature-complete yet.  I was looking at
f2fs, btrfs, and zfs again this weekend and the issues I struggle with
are the immaturity of btrfs and f2fs, the lack of working parity raid
on btrfs, the lack of many features on f2fs, and the inability to
resize vdevs on zfs which means on a system with few drives you get
locked in.  I suspect all of those will change in time, but not yet!

--
Rich