Comment by the8472
6 years ago
At least disk management is far easier with btrfs. You can restripe at will while zfs has severe limitations around resizing, adding and removing devices.
Granted, at enterprise scale this hardly matters because you can just send-receive to rebuild pools if you have enough spares, but for consumer-grade deployments it's a non-negligible annoyance.
Restriping is source of unsafety, though. A lot of ZFS data safety comes from the fact it doesn't support overwriting anything, making it so that normal operation can't introduce unrecoverable corruption. In fact, all writes are done through snapshots.
ZFS wanted to have that too (the mythical block pointer rewrite) but it never happend, instead they add clunky workarounds like indirection tables for.
It was treated more like "ok, yet another person complaining about it - here's what you need to implement, and why you won't".
The indirection tables are survivable for fixing short term mistakes, though.
Actually, this matters a lot in many enterprises. Beancounters hate excess capacities, so there are never enough spares and everything is always almost full.
Maybe SV is different...