3 ms·

Have you looked at ZFS?

by dman 12y ago

coldtea 12y ago
Have YOU looked at ZFS, and how it's unfit for desktop use?
- laumars 12y ago
  That's unsubstantiated FUD. You only have to glance through this thread to see that there are people (myself included) who run ZFS on their desktop machine (laptop in my case). People love to over exaggerate the RAM requirements for ZFS because they see build logs of enterprise-grade storage servers. But you wouldn't expect that kind of throughput on your desktop systems even with lighter file systems. And most desktops have their 64bit CPU sat idle for most of the time, so there's not even an argument for the additional instruction overhead. Obviously the real crux of argument is "what do you primarily use your desktop for"? If it's gaming, then there's little point running ZFS since you're going to be disinterested in the benefits of ZFS anyway, so it's not worth the marginal overhead. However if your desktop is a development machine, used for multimedia authoring or even just an internet terminal (like most PCs are these days), then ZFS is a viable option.
  - coldtea 12y ago
    >And most desktops have their 64bit CPU sat idle for most of the time, so there's not even an argument for the additional instruction overhead. Most "desktops" today are in fact laptops, and the reason you want to have the CPU sit idle is battery time. >However if your desktop is a development machine, used for multimedia authoring or even just an internet terminal (like most PCs are these days), then ZFS is a viable option. If you're not pooling disks together but just have the built in disk, and usb hard disks that you conenct occasionally you don't get much if anything from ZFS, but you get the penalties it incurs... And it's not a substitute for backing up your disks either...
    - laumars 12y ago
      > Most "desktops" today are in fact laptops, and the reason you want to have the CPU sit idle is battery time. That's a fair point. I'd argue that ZFS doesn't chuck that much extra CPU time that most people would notice. However if you're one of those guys that likes to tweak your power settings to the nth degree, then ZFS probably isn't best. But those kinds of people are more likely to run a tiling WM instead of a full fat compositing desktop environment; and such like. So they're definitely not your regular desktop users > If you're not pooling disks together but just have the built in disk, and usb hard disks that you conenct occasionally you don't get much if anything from ZFS, but you get the penalties it incurs... You seem to have missed quite a number of useful ZFS features off your list. Ignoring deduplication (as that is extremely memory and CPU hungry), ZFS has snapshotting, checksumming, superblock recovery (even if your journal gets trashed, you can recover it), online data integrity checks (no annoying wait screens for fsck to run through), better compression algorithms than is supported in most other file systems... I could go on, but suffice to say that ZFS is an improvement over many other file systems in other areas than just software RAIDing. That all said, in an ideal world desktops would be running HAMMER (DragonflyBSD's file system) over ZFS. I do love ZFS, but HAMMER seems a slightly better fit for desktops / laptops as it has the aforementioned features but without many of the data centre stuff that home users wouldn't need. A better compromise. However I don't see much interest for HAMMER outside of Dragonfly. > And it's not a substitute for backing up your disks either... Nobody suggested it was. However ZFS does also have backup features built into it too.

Have you looked at ZFS?

by dman 12y ago

Have you looked at ZFS?

coldtea 12y ago

Have YOU looked at ZFS, and how it's unfit for desktop use?

laumars 12y ago
That's unsubstantiated FUD. You only have to glance through this thread to see that there are people (myself included) who run ZFS on their desktop machine (laptop in my case). People love to over exaggerate the RAM requirements for ZFS because they see build logs of enterprise-grade storage servers. But you wouldn't expect that kind of throughput on your desktop systems even with lighter file systems. And most desktops have their 64bit CPU sat idle for most of the time, so there's not even an argument for the additional instruction overhead. Obviously the real crux of argument is "what do you primarily use your desktop for"? If it's gaming, then there's little point running ZFS since you're going to be disinterested in the benefits of ZFS anyway, so it's not worth the marginal overhead. However if your desktop is a development machine, used for multimedia authoring or even just an internet terminal (like most PCs are these days), then ZFS is a viable option.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >And most desktops have their 64bit CPU sat idle for most of the time, so there's not even an argument for the additional instruction overhead. Most "desktops" today are in fact laptops, and the reason you want to have the CPU sit idle is battery time. >However if your desktop is a development machine, used for multimedia authoring or even just an internet terminal (like most PCs are these days), then ZFS is a viable option. If you're not pooling disks together but just have the built in disk, and usb hard disks that you conenct occasionally you don't get much if anything from ZFS, but you get the penalties it incurs... And it's not a substitute for backing up your disks either...
  - laumars 12y ago
    > Most "desktops" today are in fact laptops, and the reason you want to have the CPU sit idle is battery time. That's a fair point. I'd argue that ZFS doesn't chuck that much extra CPU time that most people would notice. However if you're one of those guys that likes to tweak your power settings to the nth degree, then ZFS probably isn't best. But those kinds of people are more likely to run a tiling WM instead of a full fat compositing desktop environment; and such like. So they're definitely not your regular desktop users > If you're not pooling disks together but just have the built in disk, and usb hard disks that you conenct occasionally you don't get much if anything from ZFS, but you get the penalties it incurs... You seem to have missed quite a number of useful ZFS features off your list. Ignoring deduplication (as that is extremely memory and CPU hungry), ZFS has snapshotting, checksumming, superblock recovery (even if your journal gets trashed, you can recover it), online data integrity checks (no annoying wait screens for fsck to run through), better compression algorithms than is supported in most other file systems... I could go on, but suffice to say that ZFS is an improvement over many other file systems in other areas than just software RAIDing. That all said, in an ideal world desktops would be running HAMMER (DragonflyBSD's file system) over ZFS. I do love ZFS, but HAMMER seems a slightly better fit for desktops / laptops as it has the aforementioned features but without many of the data centre stuff that home users wouldn't need. A better compromise. However I don't see much interest for HAMMER outside of Dragonfly. > And it's not a substitute for backing up your disks either... Nobody suggested it was. However ZFS does also have backup features built into it too.