After toying around with Fedora, I suddenly came across this new sweet piece of file system and was wondering what was the benefit of this and how can this be useful to me from a Linux enthusiast point of view. It’s been like appropriately a decade since I’ve given up ext3 to ext4 the latest and perhaps the preferred file system as this was default in most of the OS’s out there, wherever and whenever I was distro-hopping. So According to Google:
The maximum partition size of a btrfs file system is 16 exbibytes, and the maximum file size is also 16 exbibytes. Considering that btrfs will be able to span over multiple hard drives, it’s a good thing that it supports 16 times more drive space than ext4.
Now the point is I’m just using this for my own purpose and not running any organizational chores or say mission critical workloads. So what is this btrfs and why it’s magnetic for me, so let me tell you. According to the wiki,
As Fedora is a bleeding edge software delivering machine and I’m super duper fan of this as things hardly seems to go wrong here. I thought let’s give this a shot and let me tell you i was pretty impressed on this on Wayland running latest Gnome 3.3X shell and was blazing fast on my laptop. Btrfs is on a different level compared to Ext4. Ext4 is a “pure filesystem” while Btrfs has disk and volume management built-in. You can’t have an Ext4 filesystem that spans across multiple disks without some dirty tricks (that still do not accomplish what you want). On the other hand Btrfs can do it without a hitch because it was designed to do that. Many other features such as checksums, snapshots, raid capabilities etc are also features that set Btrfs apart from other filesystems, that is the point which i wanna put forth firmly.
So my fellow readers give Btrfs a shot and forget ext4, it has some cool system rollback and snapshot features as well. Let me know if your distro supports this and your personal experiences in the comments sections below.
You’re buttery-smooth btrfs, yay! 🙂