4 ms·

ZFS and "complex management"? there comes nothing close in the open source market than ZFS and its easy and straightforward to use management tools in my opinio

ZFS and "complex management"? there comes nothing close in the open source market than ZFS and its easy and straightforward to use management tools in my opinion. You don't need a handful of tools just to do one simple task, just hack away at the zfs and zpool commands and everything gets done. No need for parted, mdadm, lvm or support of your needs compiled into the kernel. No matter on which operating system you are currently, you only need those two tools and they work the same everywhere.

zaarn 8y ago
It comes down to when you need to anything with ZFS but simply use it for data storage. Expanding a RAID vdev is not possible, instead the recommendation is to waste 50% of storage for a pool of mirrored devices to get the same protection as a RAID1 of two drives, which isn't much for some people. For the avarage home user, such a scaling option is already no longer viable. This is topped with ZFS' poor performance under low RAM conditions. FreeNAS barely managed 10MB/s when running with 2GB of RAM and an old Pentium 4 Dual Core. Not everyone can afford to throw hardware at the problem. On the other hand, Linux performs under the same conditions with 8 times the speed for simply copying files and mdadm/lvm/unraid allow me to dynamically grow the pool of harddrive space a single drive at a time. (plus mdadm/lvm is included in basically every larger distro by now, no need to install it or compile support into the kernel)
- boomboomsubban 8y ago
  >Expanding a RAID vdev is not possible, instead the recommendation is to waste 50% of storage for a pool of mirrored devices to get the same protection as a RAID1 of two drives, which isn't much for some people Or make a new vdev. It takes a bit of planning, but it's not some massive hurdle. >This is topped with ZFS' poor performance under low RAM conditions. FreeNAS barely managed 10MB/s when running with 2GB of RAM and an old Pentium 4 Dual Core. Not everyone can afford to throw hardware at the problem. FreeNAS is enterprise software, the default settings expect you to read and follow the system requirements. The developers aren't spending their time supporting it on less powerful systems, but ZFS (and likely FreeNAS) can run fine if you configure it for that hardware.
  - luke0016 8y ago
    >>Expanding a RAID vdev is not possible, instead the recommendation is to waste 50% of storage for a pool of mirrored devices to get the same protection as a RAID1 of two drives, which isn't much for some people >Or make a new vdev. It takes a bit of planning, but it's not some massive hurdle. I had a 3 disk, 6TB RAIDZ (3x 3TB drives). I bought a fourth 3TB disk when I started running low on space, not knowing that this limitation existed. I ended up using an intermediate, 8TB external drive to copy data off, re-create the RAIDZ with 4 disks, and then copy the data back. This sucked. What should I have done instead?
    - Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
      Sadly enough, the current answers are to either do what you did, or replace disks one by one. RAIDZ expansion is coming though[0]. This is the right answer to your problem, but an answer at some point in the future doesn't help you with your problem today. [0] https://www.bsdcan.org/2018/schedule/events/960.en.html https://www.bsdcan.org/2018/schedule/events/960.en.html
      - luke0016 8y ago
        Oh, this is going to be great. Thank you for the link! And, replacing disks one by one would require me to buy 3 disks instead of 1. I did that the last time I grew my array :-/
    - boomboomsubban 8y ago
      >This sucked. What should I have done instead? You should have read almost anything about ZFS before investing several hundred dollars and your data into it. It sucked for you, but seems like a reasonable ask. I'm surprised you chose ZFS without knowing about it, it seems to be mentioned in every discussion about ZFS.
      - luke0016 8y ago
        shrug I knew plenty about ZFS at the time - just not that particular fact. I was also making the point that "make a new vdev" doesn't solve that particular problem. Overall, I'm quite happy with ZFS.

zaarn 8y ago

It comes down to when you need to anything with ZFS but simply use it for data storage. Expanding a RAID vdev is not possible, instead the recommendation is to waste 50% of storage for a pool of mirrored devices to get the same protection as a RAID1 of two drives, which isn't much for some people. For the avarage home user, such a scaling option is already no longer viable. This is topped with ZFS' poor performance under low RAM conditions. FreeNAS barely managed 10MB/s when running with 2GB of RAM and an old Pentium 4 Dual Core. Not everyone can afford to throw hardware at the problem. On the other hand, Linux performs under the same conditions with 8 times the speed for simply copying files and mdadm/lvm/unraid allow me to dynamically grow the pool of harddrive space a single drive at a time. (plus mdadm/lvm is included in basically every larger distro by now, no need to install it or compile support into the kernel)

boomboomsubban 8y ago
>Expanding a RAID vdev is not possible, instead the recommendation is to waste 50% of storage for a pool of mirrored devices to get the same protection as a RAID1 of two drives, which isn't much for some people Or make a new vdev. It takes a bit of planning, but it's not some massive hurdle. >This is topped with ZFS' poor performance under low RAM conditions. FreeNAS barely managed 10MB/s when running with 2GB of RAM and an old Pentium 4 Dual Core. Not everyone can afford to throw hardware at the problem. FreeNAS is enterprise software, the default settings expect you to read and follow the system requirements. The developers aren't spending their time supporting it on less powerful systems, but ZFS (and likely FreeNAS) can run fine if you configure it for that hardware.
- luke0016 8y ago
  >>Expanding a RAID vdev is not possible, instead the recommendation is to waste 50% of storage for a pool of mirrored devices to get the same protection as a RAID1 of two drives, which isn't much for some people >Or make a new vdev. It takes a bit of planning, but it's not some massive hurdle. I had a 3 disk, 6TB RAIDZ (3x 3TB drives). I bought a fourth 3TB disk when I started running low on space, not knowing that this limitation existed. I ended up using an intermediate, 8TB external drive to copy data off, re-create the RAIDZ with 4 disks, and then copy the data back. This sucked. What should I have done instead?
  - Mister_Snuggles 8y ago
    Sadly enough, the current answers are to either do what you did, or replace disks one by one. RAIDZ expansion is coming though[0]. This is the right answer to your problem, but an answer at some point in the future doesn't help you with your problem today. [0] https://www.bsdcan.org/2018/schedule/events/960.en.html https://www.bsdcan.org/2018/schedule/events/960.en.html
    - luke0016 8y ago
      Oh, this is going to be great. Thank you for the link! And, replacing disks one by one would require me to buy 3 disks instead of 1. I did that the last time I grew my array :-/
  - boomboomsubban 8y ago
    >This sucked. What should I have done instead? You should have read almost anything about ZFS before investing several hundred dollars and your data into it. It sucked for you, but seems like a reasonable ask. I'm surprised you chose ZFS without knowing about it, it seems to be mentioned in every discussion about ZFS.
    - luke0016 8y ago
      shrug I knew plenty about ZFS at the time - just not that particular fact. I was also making the point that "make a new vdev" doesn't solve that particular problem. Overall, I'm quite happy with ZFS.