Comment Re:Can we get a real Linux filesystem, please? (Score 1) 210
Btrfs, like ZFS and Netapp's WAFL, use a far more efficient copy-on-write strategy that avoids the write penalty.
WAFL doesn't do copy-on-write. Copy-on-write means a write to a block in a file requires the original block to be read, written elsewhere for the snapshot, then the new block written in the original location. That's exactly what WAFL doesn't do. WAFL writes all changed blocks for multiple files in big RAID stripes, updating pointers to current copies and leaving snapshot pointers pointing to old copies of the updated files. Very efficient for writes, but changes almost all reads, random or sequential (within a file) into random reads (within the filesystem) because file blocks get scattered according to write order, not location of the block within the file. That's why they want lots of spindles in an aggregate and they love RAM cache and flash cache.
But since you say that copy-on-write avoids the write penalty I think you know what is does but simply don't know that it isn't copy-on-write.