Hello everyone,
this weekend I’m going to set up a new PC with Endeavour OS. It will use a PCI4.0 M.2 SSD. The main use cases for the machine are:
Gaming (Steam/Proton/Wine → fast loading of many small and/or huge files)
Photo/Video editing (-> fast loading huge raw and video files)
Programming (-> dealing with lots of files, compiling, linking…)
In general the following would of course also be nice:
Fast system boot
Fast application startup times
Timesync snapshots/restore in case system gets messed up
Now I’m wondering which file system I should choose. The following options seem to be available and quite popular:
ext4
btrfs
xfs
zfs
f2fs
Searching for benefits/drawbacks/benchmarks of these file systems proved difficult. Thus I’m not really sure which of these file systems would be the best choice for my use cases. Or does it even matter?
ext4 for anything.
The most stable and hassle-free file system ever made!
No data-destroying bugs, no fragmentation…no
I’m sure there will be a lot of people who will advice btrfs, for it’s cow and has nice snapshots in theory…
But in my view that all doesn’t matter, if it’s not as stable.
I’m running my gaming system with very similar parameters like yours. I’m using BTRFS as root without separate other partitions. I’m employing timeshift and timeshift-autosnap to snapshot directly in the filesystem before system upgrades. I’ve restored a snapshot once in 3 years, when something in the gaming stack broke and slowed down games to a crawl. It gives me enough security for a rolling release.
BTRFS is almost like any other filesystem, but has more features. If you don’t use them, you will not notice them. The only direct drawback is the snapshot nature of a COW filesystem, meaning that the snapshots take space that you don’t see, until the snapshots roll out (see Timeshift or your local equivalent).
The other thing with BTRFS, if you ever used Timeshift with ext4…
You can select 5 snapshots and delete - and they disappear.
Snapshots are also created almost instantly - so you can easily run hourly snapshots for short term security… but don’t forget the backups (snapshots = same disk).
You probably won’t notice a big speed-difference between different filesystems when loading any games or data on PCIE4.0 SSD except slow HDD.
My advice: You can have two filesystems (CoW and non-CoW) on two separate partitions on the same SSD :
Gaming on the Non-CoW Partition for example Ext4.
Steam has the ability to check games with their checksum and can fix corrupted games, AFAIK. You do not need to use CoW.
Your working data is better stored in the CoW filesystem for example Btrfs with full DUP profile (two same copies → Self-healing is enabled) and snapper tool that has the ability to create an auto snapshot every hour. It helps you to restore good version of the working data after accidentally modifying or deleting important data. It has checksum, of course.
Don’t forget that you need an automatic backup to another hard drive every day or every week.
If this setup is complicated for you then use Ext4 and backup without any stress.
ext4, that’s the one that has more tooling and stable imo. I had xfs once, never again, it’s missing some tooling that ext4 has. There are no significant performance differences between filesystems on modern hardware.
I use timeshift with ext4, restored the system multiple times with it.
I’ve been using brtfs on my system with quite a few games installed for about about a year and half or so, never had any issues. I chose btrfs for being able restore from a snapshot if needed and I like having sub-volumes that way you don’t have to think about how to divide your space between different partitions(or lvm volumes) but still having some logical separation and because it being native in the Linux kernel unlike zfs.
