The best RAID for performance and redundancy

The Btrfs (or B-tree) file system is one of the most resilient file systems. It is currently the main competitor to the ZFS file system. These file systems are quite similar: the presence of checksums for data blocks, transaction groups, and a copy-on-write mechanism. In this article, you will learn the main differences and which one is better to use in certain situations.

2. Pooling and RAID

Both file systems do not need a volume manager, raid, and other abstractions that sit between the file system and disks. This is more reliable than having a hardware RAID controller.

In addition, OpenZFS offers a convenient RAID mechanism. You can use RAIDZ1, which strips data across 3 or more drives with a single parity block. Thus, it can withstand a failure of up to 1 disk per Vdev. RAIDZ2 can use 4 or more drives and withstand up to 2 drive failures, etc.

Btrfs also has this feature and is called RAID, not RAIDZ.

4. Communities and Companies Behind Them

The FreeBSD community, Illumos, Delphix, iXsystems, Joyent, and many other open source communities rely on OpenZFS. Thanks to the CDDL license, many other organizations can use OpenZFS without our knowledge.

Btrfs used to have Red Hat as one of the top managers of its community until recently. SUSE made Btrfs the default, and as such, they are still a thriving community.

6. Supported OSes

Btrfs is the file system for Linux, and ZFS is developed internally by Sun for the Solaris OS. In addition, it can be used on FreeBSD, Apple OS X, the open-source Solaris derivatives. At the moment, ZFS can also be used on Linux. As far as Microsoft Windows is concerned, both file systems are currently not supported by this operating system.

Protect your disk data!

There is no need to look for complicated and expensive ways to recover lost files in any arrays; you can simply download DiskInternals RAID Recovery and export the recovered files to a suitable device.

This application has been constantly improving for over 15 years and never ceases to delight its customers with new features and capabilities. Satisfied customers constantly use DiskInternals services and highly recommend this application to colleagues and acquaintances. The application recovers data mainly from Linux, but also from Apple, NAS, and UNIX. Can recover data from RAID 0, 1, 0 + 1, 1 + 0, 1E, RAID 4, 5, 50, 5EE, etc. Disk imaging is also available here.

At the beginning of the process, you can activate the Recovery Wizard and feel more confident. Any questions you may have can be directed to technical support after you have a license, which can be purchased at any time of the day on the company's website and thus get more functions and capabilities.