EXT4 vs BTRFS

Adithyansm

Adithyansm

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Hello guy's
"EXT4 vs BTRFS" -that's the question
*Let me guess what will happen, you guys will jump in and comment technical replies*
But that's not the case here

Imagine:
There is someone that he/she does not have that much knowledge about Linux. He Installed Linux and partitioned his partition in Ext4 but Hardly after a month he screwed his Linux and reinstalled it this time he partitioned his partition in btrfs instead of ext4. As a normal desktop user, what are the differences he will notice when using Linux for normal daily tasks? Will he notice a huge difference in workflow?
 


For a regular user. There won't be any noticeable difference.
In fact I myself would recommend BTRFS over EXT4 for a regular hobbyist user
because it spans multiple partitions, it's less likely to fill up your hard drive.

It you have huge hard drives, BTRFS supports up to 16 times larger size than 1 EXT4 partition.
For these reasons, Fedora has made BTRFS the standard filesystem in their newer releases.

Many benchmarks put EXT4 I/O a little ahead on BTRFS, but we are talking thousanth's of second here.
Unless you are crunching gigabytes of data continuously, you won't notce any difference.

But then sometimes benchmarks are skewed also. Depending on which aticle you read
XFS is faster than EXT4, and supports larger filesystems, which is why it's the default for Redhat,
and some other enterprise systems. I've read that EXT4 beats XFS if you have dozens of threads
doing I/O simulataneously, but if it's a application with just a few threads, ( say a database )
then XFS is faster.
 
Adithyansm said:
"EXT4 vs BTRFS" -that's the question
Click to expand...
A year ago, I played around with BTRFS and made a thread about it here https://www.linux.org/threads/btrfs-how-is-it-like-to.33268/ You might find something useful there as I made some tests and posted the results. IMHO, if you want to try BTRFS, I suggest installing openSUSE since it ships with a few handy tools to make your life easier, plus, Yast installer's such a great piece of software.
 
IMO. For the everyday home user as far as I am concerned, it doesn't make a blind bit of difference, the average home user will not notice any difference in speed, and is unlikely to need the larger file segments of BTRFS
 
From my reading of the subject matter, BTRFS has a different approach to writing information to your hard drive, which as dos2unix points out, span across multiple partitions. This wikipedia explains what exactly it is in detail:

Btrfs - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

"Chris Mason, the principal Btrfs author, stated that its goal was 'to let [Linux] scale for the storage that will be available. Scaling is not just about addressing the storage but also means being able to administer and to manage it with a clean interface that lets people see what's being used and makes it more reliable'."

It would seem from this quote that Btrfs has more effective journaling, but i don't know much about journaling.

It's funny we're mentioning this, i'm doing a complete wipe of Fedora in favor of Ubuntu because i keep having a system start up error where i get a splotchy screen and i can't enter the user space. Given that i've already put several hours into finding a fix for it, and this problem has spanned across months, i know long want to have Fedora despite the desktop interface is really cool.
 
To each his own. fedora was not worth the trouble, to me.
As long as the OP is happy so am I.
 
Try them both and see which you like better.
 
f33dm3bits said:
Try them both and see which you like better.
Click to expand...
I have tested them. I just asked a casual question about what you guys think about them
 
As long as btrfs is not in current Rhel I'm not going to use it, also ext4 and xfs work just fine for me.
 
I started out on Ubuntu with ext4 but switched to openSUSE Tumbleweed using BTRFS last year, and I haven't noticed any performance differences between the two.
 
The only time I would personally use BTRFS if I was using huge amounts of data anything over 1 Exabyte or 1 Million Terabytes, which is the limit for EXT4 - but since I do not use that much data and probably never will - EXT4 is just fine

If I was Google or Facebook and accumulated boat loads of data then yes they probably use it
 
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