Table of Contents

BTRFS vs ZFS

My target is to:

With single disc setup, there is no big difference between features provided by both filesystems.

Things to consider:

Features

Feature ZFS BTRFS remarks
License CDDL GPL
Copy-on-write Yes Yes
Checksums Yes Yes ZFS: 256bit fletcher2 or SHA256; BTRFS: CRC32c
Encryption No No workaround with encryption of underlying devices
Online defragmentation Yes
Online growing / shrinking Yes
Online block dev add/rem Yes(-) Yes ZFS: only mirrored devices can be removed
Online deduplication block No btrfs: planned, external tool available
Online compression Yes LZO / ZLIB similar compression level
Subvolumes Yes Yes
Subvolumes inside subvol. Yes Yes
Limit subvolume size Yes Yes ZFS: quota, BTRFS: quatagroup
Linux root filesystem ? Yes
Striping
Mirroring
Redundancy on single disc Yes metadata ZFS: copies=n param
Online scrubbing Yes Yes scrub - scan and check data integrity
In place ext2/3/4 conversion No Yes BTRFS: with rollback possible! DO NOT USE, it is not well tested and causes errors!
maturity Yes Linux 3.10
GRUB loader support Grub2
Snapshots Yes Yes
Performance fuse kernel fuse is anymore bottleneck with moder kernels
FS Overhead
EXT4 BTRFS ZFS
270 371 269 540

http://richardhartmann.de/blog/posts/2012/02/RAID-sucks/

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E37670_01/E37355/html/ol_use_case1_btrfs.html

Check and compare:

ZFS

BTRFS