6 ms·

> ZFS is fine, but it is overkill for most home applications Yeah, not having silent data corruption is "overkill", sure. /s Why not use ZFS? It takes 15 secon

by m0zg 6y ago

> ZFS is fine, but it is overkill for most home applications Yeah, not having silent data corruption is "overkill", sure. /s Why not use ZFS? It takes 15 seconds to install, and its CLI is fairly intuitive. Works fine. Costs $0. Why not, even for "home" applications? I could see how it could be unsuitable for "entreprise" applications where there are strict performance requirements etc, but for home, I wish I could use ZFS everywhere.

paulie_a 6y ago
If it's cli it's a nonstarter Even if it has a gui it's probably a non starter unless there are literally 2 options
StavrosK 6y ago
For one, because of the fact that you can't add an extra disk to your pool if you need to. GP is saying "plan better", no need to get snarky.
- magnetic 6y ago
  What do you mean? I've done this not so long ago on my pool. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/530968/adding-disks-to-zfs-pool https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/530968/adding-disks...
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    You can't add disks to a vdev, though, which is what most people with a home NAS (including me) want.
    - trasz 6y ago
      You can add them to RAID0/1 vdevs; you can't add them to RAIDZ vdevs. Which you don't have if you don't run ZFS. You might have RAID5, but then you also have a write hole.
briffle 6y ago
or install BTRFS and be able to detect bitrot as well, but also be able to grow your storage by adding more disks. (even different sizes)
- Geezus_42 6y ago
  Just avoid RAID 5/6...
- Mister_Snuggles 6y ago
  I've been burned by BTRFS too many times to trust it. At work, our servers will get into a state where they just hang for a span from minutes to hours while BTRFS does "something". I'm not one of the admins though, so I don't know the exact details. I just know that this is a vendor-supported configuration and the vendor has been unable to tell us why this happens or offer any solution that makes it not happen. Our answer to this issue has been to rebuild servers with ext4 when things get bad. This has happened on multiple servers hosting different applications - the only commonality seems to be that write-heavy loads get it into this state. Servers that just have their OS on BTRFS but do all of their work on NFS volumes are fine. At home, I once rebooted my OpenSuse Tumbleweed laptop and ended up with a BTRFS filesystem that couldn't be mounted RW. Fortunately I was able to mount it RO after booting off installation media and copy my data off, but I couldn't get the filesystem back into a state where it could be mounted RW. I ended up reinstalling. I never did figure out the root cause, but I suspect that some BTRFS-related process was running when I rebooted. On the flip side, ZFS has never let me down in this way, but to be fair I've never subjected it to the same use-cases. Unfortunately, the inability to resize/reshape the filesystem is an issue for me. I believe that it's being worked on, but I don't think that work is production-ready yet.
- tw04 6y ago
  RAID-Z expansion is being worked on: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/8853 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/8853 Last I checked BTRFS RAID5/6 was a dumpster fire and unusable in production. Have they actually open sourced the ability to fix bitrot detection with mdraid? If not, it's kind of irrelevant. So... once again down votes without response - BTRFS raid still isn't recommended and the file healing isn't compatible with MDRAID I assume and you just don't like the fact I pointed it out? The "I'm downvoting because you pointed out a flaw in my logic" @HN is disappointing.
pantaloony 6y ago
Strongly disagree that the CLI is intuitive. It’s very easy to kick off unintended actions or back oneself into a corner while doing things that seem reasonable. It’s like using Git in that it’s very hard to do well without a good understanding of the fundamentals, which feel almost nothing like managing disks normally. Lots of things require multiple steps that aren’t obviously related and you’d better not screw them up. It’s way at the far end of the “must RTFM to use safely, and then probably brush up on it again before actually doing anything unless you use it daily” spectrum of intuitiveness. I like my ZFS mass storage volumes for my home server. I worry I’ll screw them up and/or burn an hour googling and reading the manual every time I have to touch them, though.

by m0zg 6y ago

paulie_a 6y ago

If it's cli it's a nonstarter Even if it has a gui it's probably a non starter unless there are literally 2 options

StavrosK 6y ago

For one, because of the fact that you can't add an extra disk to your pool if you need to. GP is saying "plan better", no need to get snarky.

magnetic 6y ago
What do you mean? I've done this not so long ago on my pool. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/530968/adding-disks-to-zfs-pool https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/530968/adding-disks...
- StavrosK 6y ago
  You can't add disks to a vdev, though, which is what most people with a home NAS (including me) want.
  - trasz 6y ago
    You can add them to RAID0/1 vdevs; you can't add them to RAIDZ vdevs. Which you don't have if you don't run ZFS. You might have RAID5, but then you also have a write hole.

briffle 6y ago

or install BTRFS and be able to detect bitrot as well, but also be able to grow your storage by adding more disks. (even different sizes)

Geezus_42 6y ago
Just avoid RAID 5/6...
Mister_Snuggles 6y ago
I've been burned by BTRFS too many times to trust it. At work, our servers will get into a state where they just hang for a span from minutes to hours while BTRFS does "something". I'm not one of the admins though, so I don't know the exact details. I just know that this is a vendor-supported configuration and the vendor has been unable to tell us why this happens or offer any solution that makes it not happen. Our answer to this issue has been to rebuild servers with ext4 when things get bad. This has happened on multiple servers hosting different applications - the only commonality seems to be that write-heavy loads get it into this state. Servers that just have their OS on BTRFS but do all of their work on NFS volumes are fine. At home, I once rebooted my OpenSuse Tumbleweed laptop and ended up with a BTRFS filesystem that couldn't be mounted RW. Fortunately I was able to mount it RO after booting off installation media and copy my data off, but I couldn't get the filesystem back into a state where it could be mounted RW. I ended up reinstalling. I never did figure out the root cause, but I suspect that some BTRFS-related process was running when I rebooted. On the flip side, ZFS has never let me down in this way, but to be fair I've never subjected it to the same use-cases. Unfortunately, the inability to resize/reshape the filesystem is an issue for me. I believe that it's being worked on, but I don't think that work is production-ready yet.
tw04 6y ago
RAID-Z expansion is being worked on: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/8853 https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/8853 Last I checked BTRFS RAID5/6 was a dumpster fire and unusable in production. Have they actually open sourced the ability to fix bitrot detection with mdraid? If not, it's kind of irrelevant. So... once again down votes without response - BTRFS raid still isn't recommended and the file healing isn't compatible with MDRAID I assume and you just don't like the fact I pointed it out? The "I'm downvoting because you pointed out a flaw in my logic" @HN is disappointing.

pantaloony 6y ago

Strongly disagree that the CLI is intuitive. It’s very easy to kick off unintended actions or back oneself into a corner while doing things that seem reasonable. It’s like using Git in that it’s very hard to do well without a good understanding of the fundamentals, which feel almost nothing like managing disks normally. Lots of things require multiple steps that aren’t obviously related and you’d better not screw them up. It’s way at the far end of the “must RTFM to use safely, and then probably brush up on it again before actually doing anything unless you use it daily” spectrum of intuitiveness. I like my ZFS mass storage volumes for my home server. I worry I’ll screw them up and/or burn an hour googling and reading the manual every time I have to touch them, though.