Post #1700724

How small is your smallest device? BTRFS doesn’t have a minimum size, but practically probably 50-100mb is just about doable before even just setting things up get complex. Having said that though, it’s copy-on-write and has overhead as a result, so may not function well below 1gb. ZFS meanwhile really won’t work well below probably 8gb. It’s also copy-on-write but with a lot more overhead due to how it works. It really works best on big drives and filesystems. If your old storage is in the mb range, then really neither will help you achieve what you want. BTRFS and ZFS do offer the same benefits as NTFS with regard to compression and speeding up some slower devices (due to lowering the actual read/writes needed to achieve the same result), but NTFS can go down to very small disk sizes. BTRFS and ZFS are designed and optimised for other benefits in mind. NTFS compression isn’t well supported in Linux though.