EPISODE · Jun 21, 2026 · 17 MIN
RAID Reshaping Showdown: BTRFS vs ZFS vs XFS
from My Weird Prompts
You started with three drives in RAID5. Now you've got a fourth drive and want RAID6. Can you reshape in-place without backup-and-restore? We put BTRFS, ZFS, and XFS through the wringer. BTRFS has the elegant architecture but marks parity RAID as "unstable." ZFS will look you in the eye and say no — immutable vdevs mean you're buying new drives to change parity levels. XFS plus LVM uses Linux's MD driver for production-grade reshaping since 2017, but comes with tuning gotchas. If you're a homelabber hitting the three-year wall, this episode tells you which filesystem lets you grow without regret.
What this episode covers
You started with three drives in RAID5. Now you've got a fourth drive and want RAID6. Can you reshape in-place without backup-and-restore? We put BTRFS, ZFS, and XFS through the wringer. BTRFS has the elegant architecture but marks parity RAID as "unstable." ZFS will look you in the eye and say no — immutable vdevs mean you're buying new drives to change parity levels. XFS plus LVM uses Linux's MD driver for production-grade reshaping since 2017, but comes with tuning gotchas. If you're a homelabber hitting the three-year wall, this episode tells you which filesystem lets you grow without regret.
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RAID Reshaping Showdown: BTRFS vs ZFS vs XFS
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