Disk setup is where people either buy themselves trouble or get free performance. Two cheap wins — noatime and scheduled fstrim — cover most home servers. ZFS is a bigger decision and most people do not need it yet.
The two free wins
mount | grep " / " # see current opts
# add noatime to the / mount in /etc/fstab
mount -o remount,noatime /
sudo systemctl enable --now fstrim.timernoatime drops a metadata write on every read; fstrim keeps SSDs fast as they fill. Both are nearly free performance and longevity. Put fstrim on a weekly timer and move on.
Btrfs vs ZFS — the honest take
Btrfs is easier on a small box: it lives in the kernel, snapshots are cheap, and it does not demand a RAM budget. ZFS pays off when you want byte-symmetric snapshots, replication you trust, or datasets with very different policies. The cost is RAM — it wants roughly as much as you can spare.
When to actually switch
zpool status
zfs list -o name,used,health
snaplist=$(zfs snapshot -r -t clone pool/data@check)If your pool health looks fine and you are not chasing corruption, stay put. Migrating a filesystem is where data actually gets lost, not on the quiet days.