BTRFS Implementation
Why BTRFS?
- Very scalable across drives — RAID can be enabled and modified on the fly
- Adding more drives or replacing a failed one will be very low impact and simple
- Snapshotting allows for version control with a very minimal impact on storage
- Self healing through periodic scrubbing to help prevent data loss
- Supports compression to improve storage efficiency and speed
- Built in to the kernel, easy to deploy and migrate
Migration
- Switching to BTRFS was easy, on my desktop I just reformatted my secondary drive and started an rclone to move the data over to the new partition
- Then, all I had to do was add the other drive to the volume and run a
balance to convert the drive
- I should have enabled compression before adding data to save time, but I activated it afterwards
- Using ZSTD compression saved me 11% of my data, or over 100gbs
$ sudo compsize vault/
Processed 257189 files, 4524094 regular extents (4524094 refs), 72685 inline, 486059 fragments.
Type Perc Disk Usage Uncompressed Referenced
TOTAL 89% 1.0T 1.1T 1.1T
none 100% 911G 911G 911G
zstd 59% 183G 308G 308G
- Performance of the array for reads was very strong at nearly 200MB/s which is nearing my current 1gbps connection limit
- Random read/write performance isn’t so good, as expected for mechanical drives
![[Pasted image 20251106095831.png]]
