Examining Btrfs

Do one thing and do it well.

Do too much and you may end up like Btrfs.

What about it? It does big storage really, really well.

I have to second this - the rampant layering violation that is ZFS has in my experience been extremely robust.

Maybe it's simply doing the "one coherent tool to manage large chunks of data and disks" thing well.

One thing I always found curious is that Synology supports Btrfs.

Granted, they are not exactly what I'd call a company with a rock-solid track record, but they are still a rather large premium manufacturer in the NAS space.

It seems they have either managed to contain Btrfs' complexity and prevent users from doing the dangerous things, or their own hybrid raid was even worse, or they are just very risk friendly.

Btrfs is flexible and works well for self-hosted home storage use cases, especially running cheap hardware & HDDs with mixed RPM + capacity specs (many consider it a major advantage over OpenZFS on Linux which inherits ZFS pros and cons). As far as data corruption is concerned, avoid using raid{5,6} profile (that governs how a chunk is replicated within or across a member device) for data and you should be fine.

Running OpenZFS on Linux also requires dealing with DKM(ES)S, Ubuntu being an exception (hmm)...

NOTE: Self-hosted podcast show episode 25 contains excellent coverage (ZFS vs. Btrfs) by Jonathan Panozzo from Unraid.