btrfs makes old hdds appear to operate faster

[roly33]

That would depend . If you are worried about borking an install then it is good to familiarize yourself with. I actually was able to roll back from one distro to another. In all honesty I find it much easier to just do a re-install on a badly bokred system. But it is a great tool to learn how to use.

Regards,
Ventrical

I might just stick with ext4 for now & try btrfs when I need to do a re-install as everything is working fine for now, but the roll back feature sounds good for working with the Development releases.

Roland

[benmoran]

I would recommend trying it out on a spare partition (or usb drive) and play around with the functionality. Especially making subvolumes and snapshots, and mounting them. Once you're familiar with how it all works, you'll know if it's worth it to you.

[Slug71]

at bootup I am still getting :

error: sparse file not allowed

I have this same issue with 13.04. Just hit any key and it will look for a BTRFS filesystem and then continue to boot.

Just curious, is any updates are made to BTRFS between now and 13.10, will my filesystem be updated with an inplace update to 13.10 or will I need to do a reinstall? Especially thinking about if new features are enabled by default.

[ventrical]

I have this same issue with 13.04. Just hit any key and it will look for a BTRFS filesystem and then continue to boot.

Just curious, is any updates are made to BTRFS between now and 13.10, will my filesystem be updated with an inplace update to 13.10 or will I need to do a reinstall? Especially thinking about if new features are enabled by default.

Good question. I would assume however, that an actual update to the format infrastructure would not be likely but there may be an append of features and I would wonder how they would solve depends without having to re-install or reformatting the storage device.

[kevpan815]

Just a small Warning about BTRFS: When I spoke to some of the other M500 Users on Crucial's SSD Forum, They said that they do NOT recommend using BTRFS yet as it is less than 5 years old, and may Trash your SSD!

[cariboo]

Just a small Warning about BTRFS: When I spoke to some of the other M500 Users on Crucial's SSD Forum, They said that they do NOT recommend using BTRFS yet as it is less than 5 years old, and may Trash your SSD!

Was there any explanation as to why and how, this is supposed to happen, as I'm sure if this is true the developers would like to know about it.

[kevpan815]

I am not sure why this particular user said all these things but he was one of the Veterans of the Forum and he made a reference to BTRFS as still being Experimental in Nature when compared to EXT 4.0. He instead recommended that I use EXT 4.0 with a Swap File.

[kevpan815]

I did tell him that I had no Severe problems with BTRFS and that I planned to continue using it by the way!

[ventrical]

I am not sure why this particular user said all these things but he was one of the Veterans of the Forum and he made a reference to BTRFS as still being Experimental in Nature when compared to EXT 4.0. He instead recommended that I use EXT 4.0 with a Swap File.

I have found 'btrfs' to be one of the more stable formats (with some added speed). It also has the advantage of a system restore tool (apt-btrfs-snapshot) where a user can roll back to a previous mirror of itself. I was also able to roll-back from one distribution (quantal) to a previous fresh install (precise). No other file format offers this capability. It is exclusive to BTRFS. Therefore it is a *power-tool* for developers and testers alike.

I did have some glitches with GRUB on a few occasions but GRUB rescue disk quickly solved that problem.

[ventrical]

Thankfully, on one of my faster machines and an install (partition) that I have been working (building) on from since Oneric, I had installed the BTRFS filesystem and enabled it quite some time ago. Yesterday I updated and got the 3.9.0-2 kernel and the desktop was smoked after a hard shutdown. Also, fortunately for me, I have a KVM which makes it easier to study and apply the btrfs code needed to do a rollback on any given machine (within the array that had btrfs installed). This saved me hours of downtime trying to troublshoot and eventually most probably having to do a fresh install. apt-btrfs-snapshot took me back to a more stable time.Also, I had not turned off the tool and so each time I had update/upgraded I have a snapshot at those stages so I can literally switch between snapshots.
Edit:

But I was not able to get the Unity Panel in saucy for whatever reason. Started another thread on that.