So recently I chose to switch all of my drives to XFS(about 8 drives, 2 in a RAID0) I had been using EXT4 since I was on Linux.
Does anyone here have any experience with XFS performance and maintance vs EXT4? If not what partitioning scheme do you run and why?
As far as I can recall, only 2 filesystems on Linux ever had me lose data: btrfs and xfs (in about 15-20 years). Besides those I have used ext2/3/4, jfs, reiserfs and zfs. The xfs data loss occured after a power loss, the btrfs loss was due to plain bugs (twice actually).
In the mean time xfs has gotten better resilience against power loss (at least for metadata) and I think it is default in RHEL as well so that should give it some mileage. I'd still do some research on power loss scenarios and experiences for xfs before making the final choice.
For home usage where power redundancy is not that common, I'd probably stick with ext4 if I had no other option.
My biggest issue with any file system other than EXT4 is that a lot of linux programs are built and tested on EXT4.
You can sometimes run into bugs and issues if your home directory is partitioned in XFS, BTRFS, or ZFS.
For storage, XFS is great and sometimes has higher performance than EXT4.
All of my storage drives are LUKS XFS, My / and /home are still LUKS EXT4.
Thats pretty much what I do.
I also have a 40GB BTRFS partition that I setup to make a pseudo apple time machine across a couple external drives.
I have my pictures on auto backup and then I image the partition every couple weeks JUUUUST in case the auto back up misses something.
XFS is great for things like large (30+ GB) files; a lot of the time I'll have USB's or external drives as XFS because I know they will always be safely unmounted, and low power so power interrupt won't be likely.
For now I stick with EXT4 for / and /home just because its the standard and works well with everything.
All more important data is automatically backed up on an NFS share to my local file-server, running FreeNAS.
I few months ago, I had to fix my dad's computer. He had Open SUSE Leap 42.1 and XFS for his /home. He is quite fond of performing hard-shutdowns on his computer and one fateful day he had a brownout and his metadata was corrupted and when it rebooted into terminal mode and I had to go over and fix it. After that, he was back on EXT4, and I had a talk with him about why he should have a UPS, like with what I do on all my shit.
If there's one take away its that, you really need to have a UPS if you're going to be using XFS. You need a UPS anyway, but more so if you are using XFS for anything serious.
XFS does not work with some steam games so that poo'ed on my lunch when I tried it.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/620695877288637183/
I was tempted to run XFS on /home since it's a RAID but I have seen several comments advising against it. I might try it since I Like to live dangerously, and all my data (important) is backed up onto several drives. I will be getting a UPS soon so I can try this reliably. RHEL has XFS as the default so I wanted to try.
I have transfered tons of large files and am amazaed with XFS speed. Also it's small footprint on the drives. My EXT4 partitions would consume almost 8GB. On small drives (250GB) I have seen an average of 200MB of space occupied by the FS. More free space for stuff !
Do you experience fragmentation much? What utilities do you use for it? ext4=e2fsck
No, as most of my stuff is SSD's; where fragmentation is N/A.
For stuff that is hard disks, its usually copied somewhere else, wiped, then put back on. Much faster than defragging.
The only thing that I still defrag on a regular basis, is on an NTFS drive where I have steam games installed. 2+ TiB SSD's are still way too high in price.
Eden 
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