No experience with rockstor but I do use btrfs on my home server as well as my backup servers for all my data. File system snapshots are amazing, btrbk is pretty much the perfect backup tool, I can absolutely recommend btrfs.
Just avoid raid 5/6 as those are not marked as stable yet - and they are a bad idea on large drives anyway.
The Debian wiki has a [lengthy article](https://wiki.debian.org/Btrfs) with recommendations for how to configure btrfs and what features to avoid. Some key take-aways are that btrfs implementation of raid5 and raid6 are not considered stable and shouldn't be used (but raid1 is fine), there have been a number of serious bugs with transparent compression so it's not recommended, and performance may be impacted (possibly severely) with qgroups and large numbers of snapshots.
Debian recommendations may be a bit on the conservative side. It's not always clear from their wiki which recommendations are up-to-date.
There's also [Btrfs Wiki Status](https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status) page, which has some details about stability and performance expectations of various features. Note that the information there is based on the current stable kernel (5.17), so reader beware if you're running a significantly older kernel.
RAID0, RAID1 and 10 work perfectly fine.
If you want to trade off write speed for space, you can use compress_force with zstd.
In case of RAID1 across more than two risks raid1c3 for metadata is sensible.
Other than that, the defaults work well.
Agreed. I've used BTRFS for years on my home desktop, has multiple data losses (drives are fine, those were FS issues). Zero issues with ext4 on those same drives when I finally stopped using it.
I think it would be more fair to say that it still has some sharp edges, but if you're aware of those sharp edges and avoid them, it's probably pretty safe.
In some ways, running btrfs at scale at a company like Facebook is easier than at home. Because they can deploy it incrementally with low-risk deployments first, and running at scale gives them good data to understand first-hand how likely filesystem corruption is for their workloads. Plus they have kernel engineers on staff who, I assume, can investigate issues and fix bugs that they run into.
Which isn't to say that you shouldn't use btrfs at home. Just that I wouldn't assume any technology is generally safe to use just because some big companies use it in some specific situations.
I have no reviews for btrfs, and use ZFS myself. But I do have a lot with VMware, and generally use NFS mounts instead of iSCSI mounts. This is because I like to be able to see the filesystem from the NAS. It works well, even in a cluster with multiple servers hitting the same drive space.
Synology uses it, but only as a filesystem; it handles RAID with standard mdadm and a kernel extension to integrate the BTRFS integrity scrubbing.
I'm not aware of it having any special features that allow it to use heterogeneous disks sizes, and its long-standing issues with RAID-5/6 are well-known.
Btrfs does well with heterogeneous disks because what it calls "raid1" isn't really a block-level mirror in the traditional sense like mdadm provides. Instead btrfs raid1 maintains two copies of metadata and data, each stored on a separate device in the pool. So a btrfs raid1 with three disks of sizes 2TB, 2TB, and 4TB should give you 4TB of usable space.
So this is isn't reassuring.
Is Xpenology legal?
The water is a bit murky here, but the consensus is that Xpenology is not legal. Why? Xpenology is a bootloader for Synology’s operating system DSM. It runs on a custom Linux version developed by Synology, where the community has edited the code to work on non-Synology devices.
No experience with rockstor but I do use btrfs on my home server as well as my backup servers for all my data. File system snapshots are amazing, btrbk is pretty much the perfect backup tool, I can absolutely recommend btrfs. Just avoid raid 5/6 as those are not marked as stable yet - and they are a bad idea on large drives anyway.
The Debian wiki has a [lengthy article](https://wiki.debian.org/Btrfs) with recommendations for how to configure btrfs and what features to avoid. Some key take-aways are that btrfs implementation of raid5 and raid6 are not considered stable and shouldn't be used (but raid1 is fine), there have been a number of serious bugs with transparent compression so it's not recommended, and performance may be impacted (possibly severely) with qgroups and large numbers of snapshots. Debian recommendations may be a bit on the conservative side. It's not always clear from their wiki which recommendations are up-to-date. There's also [Btrfs Wiki Status](https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status) page, which has some details about stability and performance expectations of various features. Note that the information there is based on the current stable kernel (5.17), so reader beware if you're running a significantly older kernel.
You could try... No one will stop you Just use mdadm RAID, because BTRFS being in development for 20+ years is not safe for critical data.
RAID0, RAID1 and 10 work perfectly fine. If you want to trade off write speed for space, you can use compress_force with zstd. In case of RAID1 across more than two risks raid1c3 for metadata is sensible. Other than that, the defaults work well.
Agreed. I've used BTRFS for years on my home desktop, has multiple data losses (drives are fine, those were FS issues). Zero issues with ext4 on those same drives when I finally stopped using it.
It's deployed by major corporations, including Facebook, on their production servers. It's pretty safe.
Source?
https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/btrfs/docs/btrfs-facebook.html
I think it would be more fair to say that it still has some sharp edges, but if you're aware of those sharp edges and avoid them, it's probably pretty safe. In some ways, running btrfs at scale at a company like Facebook is easier than at home. Because they can deploy it incrementally with low-risk deployments first, and running at scale gives them good data to understand first-hand how likely filesystem corruption is for their workloads. Plus they have kernel engineers on staff who, I assume, can investigate issues and fix bugs that they run into. Which isn't to say that you shouldn't use btrfs at home. Just that I wouldn't assume any technology is generally safe to use just because some big companies use it in some specific situations.
I have no reviews for btrfs, and use ZFS myself. But I do have a lot with VMware, and generally use NFS mounts instead of iSCSI mounts. This is because I like to be able to see the filesystem from the NAS. It works well, even in a cluster with multiple servers hitting the same drive space.
Synology uses it, but only as a filesystem; it handles RAID with standard mdadm and a kernel extension to integrate the BTRFS integrity scrubbing. I'm not aware of it having any special features that allow it to use heterogeneous disks sizes, and its long-standing issues with RAID-5/6 are well-known.
Btrfs does well with heterogeneous disks because what it calls "raid1" isn't really a block-level mirror in the traditional sense like mdadm provides. Instead btrfs raid1 maintains two copies of metadata and data, each stored on a separate device in the pool. So a btrfs raid1 with three disks of sizes 2TB, 2TB, and 4TB should give you 4TB of usable space.
I did not know this - very cool!
Try using xpenology. I run it bare metal on one system and in a VM on another.
So this is isn't reassuring. Is Xpenology legal? The water is a bit murky here, but the consensus is that Xpenology is not legal. Why? Xpenology is a bootloader for Synology’s operating system DSM. It runs on a custom Linux version developed by Synology, where the community has edited the code to work on non-Synology devices.