On 23 July 2013 23:36, Ally Biggs <bluechrome@???> wrote:
> What is the difference between btrfs and zfs? I have seen that zfs seems
> to be quite popular with NAS / file server builds.
>
ZFS was originally made by Sun Microsystems, BTRFS was originally created
at Oracle but the guy who makes it now works at FusionIO. They are both
almost comparable file systems in terms of features and flexibility, but
ZFS is licensed as CDDL which conflicts with Linux's GPL license so it
can't be distributed willy nilly with various distrobutions.
http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html#WhatAboutTheLicensingIssue
Both are designed as scalable file systems to solve the problems for large
storage solutions. I think the key difference (other than license) is that
ZFS requires a lot of RAM for caching, which makes ZFS very impractical for
desktop/laptop installations.
More feature information is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Features
Filesystems like ZFS or BTRFS allow snapshotting without the need for LVM.
Of course why would anyone in their right mind look further than XFS?
But for all practical purposes, intent, and availability. EXT4 is perfectly
fine for Fedora/Ubuntu/etc users to run machines on EXT4 and expand into
gigantic LVM or raid volumes.
Robin, I would take a backup before you convert two drives to an LVM volume
of course. You might find an external backup drive more practical to manage
than a RAID.
Rich
P.S. XFS
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