Those are some good points. I guess I was thinking about the hardware. At least where I do RAID, it’s on the controller, so that offloads much of the parity checking and such to the controller and not the CPU. It’s all probably negligible for the apps that I run, but my hardware is quite old, so maybe trying to squeeze all the performance I can is a worthwhile activity.
Generally, if a lower level can do a thing, I prefer to have the lower level do it. It’s not really a reason, just a rule of thumb. I like to think that the lower level is more efficient to do the thing.
I use LVM snapshots to do my backups. I don’t have any other reason for it.
That all being said, I’m using btrfs on one system and if I really like it, I may migrate to it. It does seem a whole lot simpler to have one thing to learn than all the layers.
I’ve got raid 6 at the base level and LVM for partitioning and ext4 filesystem for a k8s setup. Based on this, btrfs doesn’t provide me with any advantages that I don’t already have at a lower level.
Additionaly, for my system, btrfs uses more bits per file or something such that I was running out of disk space vs ext4. Yeah, I can go buy more disks, but I like to think that I’m running at peak efficiency, using all the bits, with no waste.
I am interested in compression. I may give it a try when I swap out my desktop system. I did try btrfs in it’s early, post alpha stage, but found that the support was not ready yet. I think I had a VM system that complained. It is older now and more mature and maybe it’s worth another look.