In today's environment, "storage" is both ridiculously-abundant and ridiculously-fast. Very likely, the "default" choices made by your distro will be perfectly fine for you.

However, if you feel that you are in "an edge case," you need to do systematic research. It would surprise me very greatly if any particular "filesystem architecture," today, would make any sort of measurable difference. However, feel free to conduct research to prove otherwise.

Meanwhile: "don't take life-lessons from 'the Internet.'"

The phrase "my own use" is terribly ambiguous. As your own browsing platform? Your own media server? Your own video editing platform? What is the use you need this server to serve?

If it is just for general use I have to agree that using the default for your distribution is a good shot: the maintainers SELECTED it for the general use case. IT is what your distribution was DESIGNED around and DESIGNED and configured to use. Changing it should be done ONLY if you have a specific target configuration and advantage in mind.

NEVER at the prompting of some unnamed wag on REDDIT or YOURTUBE, and seldom at the prompting of anyone HERE! (We have a pretty good community, but every single one of us has been wrong before and we only know the part of your situation that you have TOLD us. And we might have missed something critical in THAT!)

Read this for some ideas.

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/filesystems

You repeat this numerous times and as has been stated those are definitely not a source to take as expert advice.

If you cannot give a name of the individual involved and separately confirm that individual is a bonafide expert in the file system mode he is suggesting you use, then you should consider his advice with a VERY LARGE GRAIN OF SALT. It usually is personal opinion or based on an agenda and seldom on the facts that would fit your use case.

In other words, the distro you are using has through long time experience determined that the file system they provide works best for the very great majority of their users. Their reputation is based on a stable and reliable file system as well as the software they provide. If the file system was not up to par they would quickly switch to one that was better.

The great majority of distros use ext[234] which has been around for longer than linux has existed so it is very stable and reliable.
Other file systems exist and are mostly for specialized use or just because they are different. Different does not mean better for your home use.

I have used a stable distro for over 30 years, (beginning with ext3 which was over time upgraded to ext4) and have NEVER had any reason to consider it should be replaced. Also consider the fact that many enterprise servers use the ext4 file system because it is so reliable.

I have to say it is not an acceptable answer. Youtube never told me anything. You need to provide much better information about your sources, otherwise it is just crap.

To be fair, there IS a LOT more crap out there than good information. Most people do not know how to tell the difference, or they would not be looking at it in the first place. And a VERY low percentage know to check with a community like LQ before taking action.

The OP did the right thing. He came to people who might actually KNOW something and ASKED!

OP, if this is for your private home machine, just use ext4.

ZFS is cool and has some amazing features, but in your case it's analogous to using an 8 tonne excavator to dig a rose bed.

You'll need to jump through hoops to add support for it to your Linux kernel, and unless you're thoroughly across the fundamental workings of things, this will cause headaches every time there is a kernel update.

I hate to burst the OPs bubble but certain YouTube content creators tend to have strong opinions for or against either of the two filing systems that your asking us about in this discussion. I'd strongly recommend that the OP do their own research however, ZFS is a pretty memory intensive filing system and therefore it's recommended that you have plenty of ram.

I'd also tend to think that ZFS is more targeted towards enterprise situation (SANS) Storage Area Networks and backhands for iscussi and nfs storage pools as ZFS does have quite afew duplication and error correcting tools and it is also modestly fault tolerant.

You only need a lot of RAM for ZFS if you plan on using deduplication. The ZFS ARC is cache. Like with other filesystems, the cache grows overtime, but will be freed if the system needs to use the RAM for other things.

OP left the building.

i'm here, and i appreciate all the replies i have gotten,

i have just seen alot of videos on youtube and a lot of commends on reddit saying that zfs is the greatest thing to happen to file systems in the history of file systems and that everyone should switch over to it, so i'm just trying to understand if there are any cons to zfs or if it's not as good as people have told me

i'm trying to do my own research now.

Condé-Nast's Reddit is not a reliable source of technology advice, so it is good that you are beginning your own investigation of the matter.

As for whether OpenZFS is good or not, it depends 100% on context and use-case. Both EXT4 and OpenZFS really are as good as people say, but they don't do the same thing so they are not comparable.

Again, it depends on what you want out of a file system as to whether one or the other is suitable for your activities.

Obviously not, since you not only opened another thread that essentially is asking this same question, but you are ALSO ignoring what you're told. You were told, point blank, that YouTube *IS NOT* a good source of information, and neither is Reddit. You were told what ZFS is and what situations it applies to, and you were told point-blank that for a single-user system (laptop) with external drives, it *MAKES NO SENSE*. Not sure how else you need to be told, or what else we can explain to you.

AGAIN: ZFS is used on servers for SPECIFIC USE CASES. You don't have a server. Your current system has no problems at all. So what, exactly, is your goal here???

1 members found this post helpful.

i have no idea what you mean by "what you want out of a file system"

doesn't literally everyone want the exact same thing? to be able to see my data? copy and paste my data? perform basic manipulations of my data?

this whole "what do i want" thing doesn't make sense, i want what everyone else wants.

> since you not only opened another thread that essentially is asking this same question

it was a completely different question that new people would have really appreciated to know the answer to.


> but you are ALSO ignoring what you're told. You were told, point blank, that YouTube *IS NOT* a good source of information, and neither is Reddit. You were told what ZFS is and what situations it applies to, and you were told point-blank that for a single-user system (laptop) with external drives, it *MAKES NO SENSE*.

i was also told (on youtube and reddit) that zfs is the greatest thing that has ever happened in file systems and i need to move over to it right now,

question for you, do i have your permission to compare and contrast the things i have been told and to come to my own conclusions?