In threads like this I keep hearing about ZFS. What would be the drawbacks of running ZFS as a home user? I keep my OS on the SSD and my files on spinning rust, if that's relevant.

▲

mbreese 15 hours ago | parent [-]

1) you have to have an OS that supports it.

2) even if your OS supports it, you may have difficulty using it for your root volume, so partitioning is probably required.

2a) in your case you may not want to use it on your boot volume which would negate the SSD benefit for you.

3) it is recommended that you have ECC RAM due to the checksums. This isn’t a hard and fast requirement, but it does make you more resilient to bitflips.

4) it isn’t the absolute fastest file system. But it’s not super slow. There are caching options for read and write that benefit from SSDs, but you’re just adding costs here to get speed increases.

I only use it on servers or NASs. The extra hassles of using it on a workstation keep me from running it on a laptop. Unless you want to use FreeBSD that is… then you’d be fine (and FreeBSD is pretty usable as a daily driver). Realistically, I’m not sure how practical it is for most home users. But it is an example of what a filesystem can offer when it is well designed.

▲

deltoidmaximus 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm always surprised how often ZFS is recommended when this comes up but not BTRFS which also has checksumming and scrubs and doesn't suffer some of ZFS's drawbacks of complexity and OS integration.

	▲	mbreese 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is a fair point. I think that the instability of early releases of BTRFS and the (lack of) commitment of especially RedHat made me not spend too much time working with it. The lack of a RAID solution made it not feasible for my purposes for a long time, and I was already quite familiar with ZFS through working with Solaris and FreeBSD. Trust in filesystems is hard won and easily lost[0]. I also think the popularity of FreeNAS especially contributed to the popularity of ZFS. [0] I still look at XFS skeptically after a crash I suffered nearly 20 years ago. It’s not a rational fear, but it’s still there.

▲

dotancohen 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I use Debian at home, with separate boot, /, and /home/ partitions. I have no idea what type of cheap memory is stuffed into the motherboard - it's certainly not homogeneous. I do prioritise resiliency over speed, or even space.

Still something I should look into? Thank you!

	▲	mbreese 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The servers I use ZFS on are Debian, so it’s well supported in that way. I’m pretty sure ZFS on Debian uses dkms, so if you want to try it on a data partition, it will work. Still, unless you want to tinker with something new I can’t really recommend it. Would it work? Yes. Do you need it? No. You’re probably fine with whatever FS you currently have running. ZFS works on Debian, but it’s not first-party support (due to licensing). Do I think you’d have issues if you wanted to try it? Probably not. I’m just conservative in what I’d recommended for a daily use machine. I prioritize working over everything else, so I’d hate for you to try it and end up with a non working system. Here’s what I’d recommend instead - try it in a VM first. See if you can get it to work in a system setup like yours. See if it’s something that you like. If you want to use it on your primary machine, then you’ll be able to make a more informed decision.
	▲	chungy 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I use ZFS on both my desktop and laptop each with Linux (in addition to a server, also running ZFS, but on FreeBSD). It's actually really not terribly hard, but I might be biased since I've been doing since it 2011 :) If you can/are willing to use UEFI, ZFSBootMenu is a Linux oriented solution that replicates the power of FreeBSD's bootloader, so you can manage snapshots and boot environments and rollback checkpoints all at boot without having to use recovery media (that used to be required when doing ZFS on Linux). Definitely worth looking into: https://zfsbootmenu.org/