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.

  • @[email protected]OP
    2•1 year ago

    Thanks for the help. Both of my drives are SSDs, the boot drive is M2 and the storage is SATA. I’ve heard filesystems that support compression would be better for their health and lifespan as they’d have to write less. But yes, no matter what, I will keep constant backups. Snapshots would be appreciated, but since I’ll run Debian I don’t think they’d be that necessary, if to have them there’s a lot of problems to deal with in exchange.

    • Nine
      1•1 year ago

      Since both drives are SSDs there’s nothing really stopping you from using BTRFS. You are correct that the features for BTRFS are better for the long term health of your SSDs and if you feel comfortable with it then you should 100% use it. That being said with todays SSDs the life span extending features of BTRFS, F2FS, etc are going to be minimal at best. So don’t stress too much over running it or not. Just use whatever you’re most comfortable with.