I have 3TB as the main active storage on my workstation, across two SSD’s, now I know that defraging and SSD has no point, in fact just adds additional wear and tear. I was wondering should I be doing any maintenance to my file systems /root /home /.snapshot, on the SSD’s. they have been working for three years now with no problems or errors but just wondered what others thought

  •  khalil   ( @khalil@beehaw.org ) English
    1•1 year ago

    I’d mostly focus on scrub, but I’ll also recommend that you keep an eye on your unallocated blocks, running out of them can get you into out-of-space situations that are non-trivial to fix. My general recommendation is about 5G per device, that should give it enough breathing room that it won’t -ENOSPC on most workloads. Also, please note that unallocated space is a subset of free space, that is, all unallocated space is free space but the inverse isn’t true.

    Getting more unallocated space is as easy as running a balance with a filter, say “btrfs balance start -dusage=10 /mountpoint”. Just don’t balance metadata unless you want to convert it.

    Regarding defrag, I still defrag databases, system journal files, etc, even on SSDs. Those workloads tend to cause a lot of fragmentation that can impact your performance (try reading your journalctl logs before and after a defrag, as an example).