Which is better for a home media server: zfs or btrfs or LVM/md? [closed]
I am currently using btrfs, having used zfs in the past. zfs is quite memory hungry and isn't "linux-native", so if you're happy with a newer / less proven filesystem I recommend btrfs.
If you do go btrfs on Ubuntu LTS I recommend holding out for 14.04 since the recent kernels have a lot of btrfs updates.
A more traditional system would involve LVM + md software raid, this is a tried and tested solution that can give you the expandable storage, software raid, snapshots, etc etc but is not as "cool" as the newer filesystems and misses some features (like checksumming / COW).
Hardware RAID is much revered by some, but I think it's like dreaming of having an US army tank as your only vehicle. Sure it's safe, but it's huge, has prohibitive maintenance and fuel costs and actually becomes a trap when it lets you down in the middle of nowhere, with no standard repair service being able to help you.
Plus hardware RAID has well-known flaws that full software-RAID solutions like BTRFS and ZFS avoid.
For the kind of use you're planning, there's no "better" software-RAID solution between ZFS and BTRFS, it's only a matter of choosing the one that suits you best :
- ZFS and BTRFS are both excellent software-RAID / Volume Manager integrated solutions
- ZFS and BTRFS both feature copy-on-write, snapshots and blocks check-sum control
- ZFS can handle much bigger filesystems, but BTRFS can handle way enough TB for any private storage box
- communities are working on ZFS-ports for Linux, BSD and OS X, based on the last open sources that were available from Sun Microsystems' repository before closing (they don't have the very latest features implemented by Oracle, but it's a mature FS)
- BTRFS is offered as an optional package in most Linux distributions as it's not considered stable yet, but continues to be developed at a fast pace
- ZFS uses more RAM than BTRFS as previous poster mentioned it (4GB minimum, 8GB recommended, but the more the better)
Hope it helps.