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.
A lot of these responses seem… dated. There’s a reason TruNAS and such use ZFS now.
I would recommend ZFS 100%. The copy-on-write (allowing you to recover almost anything), simple snapshots, direct disk encryption, and ability to not only check the file system, but tell you exactly which file has an issue if there is an error, make it an easy choice even if its a one-disk system.
Personally I use date times for my snapshot names, and delete old ones as time goes on. Its fabulous for backups.
Isn’t zfs out of tree?
Yes its license is not GPL compliant.
Do you mean for the boot drive?
Well yeah, ZFS is absolutely fantastic for a NAS, but it’s complete overkill for a desktop. That’s why I recommend BTRFS for a desktop like this, and still recommend ZFS if you’re building a NAS (mine also uses BTRFS, but that’s because I don’t need the features and would rather only deal with one FS).