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.

  • hornedfiend
    1·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been using ext4/btrfs for a long time,but recently I decided to give xfs a try and it feels pretty solid all rounder fs.

    I know it’s a very old and very well supported fs,developed by Silicon Graphics and has been getting constant improvements over time with various performance improvements andchecksuming. TBH,for my use casesanything would work but BTRFS snapshots were killing my storage and I got bored with the maintenance task.

    Archwiki has amazing documentation for all FS,so might be worth a look.