I’m having trouble understanding all the benefits of BTRFS and how they’ll apply to me.

Copy on Write and auto-compression seem like they will free up a bit of space.

What other practical benefits will I see from using BTRFS? Are there any noticeable performance benefits?

I use my computer to dual-boot. I don’t need snapshots because I have a custom script for a fresh install. I use my PC for gaming and work. I’ve got an NVMe, two SSD’s and one HDD.

Thanks in advance!

  • @[email protected]English
    6•1 year ago

    For me, BTRFS is worth it for the transparent compression and file integrity checks alone.

    I am not sure what Fedora does for virtual machines via boxes (like transparently disabling COW), but one caveat with BTRFS is that you have to be aware that COW is a problem for usage patterns of virtual machines on their images. Just for this one example alone BTRFS is probably not a good fit for the average user.

    Another thing which I just learned very recently, is to mount BTRFS volumes with the noatime option significantly speeds up a lot of workloads on my machine (machine has a decent SSD). Again, using the noatime option might create some problems in corner cases, so one should be aware what one is doing.