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Assuming I know nothing about ZFS, would it be a bad idea to install CachyOS on ZFS? (piefed.world)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by daggermoon@piefed.world to c/linuxquestions@lemmy.zip

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All of my important data is on btrfs drives. I intend to install my system on ZFS. Why, you may ask? Because I can. That's the fun of Linux after all. I intend to mount btrfs drives as well. I hear that ZFS can break fairly easily? Is this a bad idea?

Edit: I understand ZFS is out of tree but CachyOS maintains their own package and dkms so it shouldn't matter I would think?

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[–] LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

ZFS is magic and all the hate is from absolute idiots. It's fancy features are no harder to use than BTRFS's, and its resiliency is phenomenal with enough drives.

I was having constant IO errors and problems due to bad SATA cables/controllers for months, and it only halted my system maybe three times. It never failed to boot after each hard reset, and a scrub quickly corrected issues every time. For months.

I know it's anecdotal, but I also know if it were any other file system running my proxmox, my VMs and perhaps even my main OS would've been irrevocably corrupted under any other file system over the months it took me to troubleshoot my physical controllers/cables.

It has never been difficult to take ZFS snapshots or restore, and I never had to use them to fix the thousands of detectable IO errors over those months, either. I've fallen in love with ZFS, and it has had nothing to do with the sales pitches I've heard over the years.

If CachyOS even supports it tacitly much like the now old version of proxmox I have installed does, it'll be worth it. At least assuming you have enough redundancy in drives to take advantage. I have 12 HDDs controlled by two mirrored NVMe special devices (holds the file index and I think hashes?) with high write tolerance that were surviving all the IO errors. I'm sure that tolerance drops significantly with only a few SATA devices and no special devices, though IMO the algorithms have more than proven their worth.