• circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 month ago

    The CoW nature of Btrfs means it’s often slower than ext4 for common tasks, right? It also means more writes to your SSDs.

    I’ve stuck to ext4 so far, as someone who doesn’t really have a need for snapshotting.

    Edit: I’m not an expert on file systems in the least, so do chime in if these assumptions are incorrect.

      • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 month ago

        But if the file system needs extra writes anyway for CoW, and the SSD needs its own CoW, then wouldn’t that end up being exponential writes? Or is there some mechanism which mitigates that?

        • InverseParallax@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          The fs does cow then releases the old block if appropriate.

          The ssd has a tracking map for all blocks, it’s cow relies on a block being overwritten to free the old block.

          Basically it works out the same either way.