Compared to btrfs it’s claimed to be faster and having working RAID support.
Its unique feature is using a fast device as cache to speed up access to slower, larger disks, I think.
Yes. The intelligent multi-device-type feature is a huge improvement for any workload that needs more space than what an SSD can affordably provide, even moreso with the reliability of eg RAID1.
Before that I had to use BTRFS (RAID1) on bcache (not fs) devices, but half of the cache space was being wasted on the redundant copies because the two systems operate independently.
To explain in case someone doesn’t know what this means, it’s something BTRFS doesn’t have (and AFAIK isn’t even on the roadmap). It means you could have, say, an SSD and a more reliable HDD RAIDed such that every stripe on the HDD counts as multiple writes; and you might set that system up so that the SSD is read with priority, and the HDD is written in the background, so that - even though you have a slow drive in the RAID, throughput happens at the faster SSD speeds.
The average user probably won’t use this much, but there are all sorts of ways this could be leveraged, by companies, self-hosters, smart OS installation scripts, even removable drive mounters, like udiskie.
Compared to btrfs it’s claimed to be faster and having working RAID support. Its unique feature is using a fast device as cache to speed up access to slower, larger disks, I think.
Yes. The intelligent multi-device-type feature is a huge improvement for any workload that needs more space than what an SSD can affordably provide, even moreso with the reliability of eg RAID1.
Before that I had to use BTRFS (RAID1) on bcache (not fs) devices, but half of the cache space was being wasted on the redundant copies because the two systems operate independently.
To explain in case someone doesn’t know what this means, it’s something BTRFS doesn’t have (and AFAIK isn’t even on the roadmap). It means you could have, say, an SSD and a more reliable HDD RAIDed such that every stripe on the HDD counts as multiple writes; and you might set that system up so that the SSD is read with priority, and the HDD is written in the background, so that - even though you have a slow drive in the RAID, throughput happens at the faster SSD speeds.
The average user probably won’t use this much, but there are all sorts of ways this could be leveraged, by companies, self-hosters, smart OS installation scripts, even removable drive mounters, like udiskie.
Compared to btrfs, it has native encryption too - though it’s said to be unaudited at the moment. Btrfs needs dmcrypt for encryption support.