should I put my multi-device btrfs filesystem on disk partitions or raw devices?

Posted by Glyph on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Glyph
Published on 2012-06-03T19:50:47Z Indexed on 2012/06/03 22:42 UTC
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partitioning

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raid

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storage

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btrfs

If I'm going to create a multi-device btrfs filesystem. The official recommendation from the documentation apppears to be to create it on raw devices; i.e. /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc, etc, but this is not explained.

Are there any advantages to creating a partition table on these devices first, either GPT or MBR, and then creating the filesystem on /dev/sdb1, /dev/sdc1 et cetera? Does feeding btrfs whole devices have some particular advantage, or are these basically equivalent?

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