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BTRFS for Linux gaming? (lemy.lol)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm using EndeavourOS with ext4 file system for daily usage and a dual bootable Windows for gaming. What I want to have right now is getting rid of Windows completely.

When I tried it before, I had to try multiple tweaks for a game and find which one worked on Linux. Therefore, I want to take a snapshot with BTRFS and try it until I find the right configuration.

While I have quite a bit of experience with Linux, I've never used BTRFS. Do you think it's worth it?

I thought about keeping the games on the ext4 system, but I hate splitting the disk. I'm thinking of keeping the games in a non-snapshot volume.

UPDATE: I just re-installed EndeavourOS with BTRFS + snapper + BTRFS Assistant :)

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[–] KindaABigDyl 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

There's no reason btrfs shouldn't work for every use case.

That said I think the slight performance gains of ext4 over btrfs make it worth sticking to ext4 for games. Imo it's similar to as if you had you main system on an HDD but ran games off of an SSD; that's how much faster it feels.

I would install games to a separate ext4 partition but steam to btrfs (for configs) in that case.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

RAID 5/6 aren't yet recommended for general use on BTRFS by the developers.

Other than that I agree it should be suitable for anything, and an improvement over ext4 in some situations.

If you don't know what RAID 5/6 is you are good.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

And even then, you should probably be using RAID 10 instead. Resilvering a RAID 5 array is hard on the disks, so there's an elevated risk of the entire RAID failing. RAID 6 should eliminate this, but in a desktop system, do you really have enough space to make it worthwhile? You'd need 5+ drives to beat RAID 10 capacity, and that's a lot of space. IMO, RAID 5/6 is just not a great option in general. Don't cheap out on your RAID setup, do the industry standard, which is RAID 10.

I use BTRFS in a RAID 1 on my NAS (plan to upgrade to RAID 10 when I run out of space), and no RAID on my desktop. Everything important gets backed up to my NAS.