Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ZFS fans, rejoice – RAIDz expansion will be a thing soon

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 198 posts

Re: ZFS fans, rejoice – RAIDz expansion will be a thing soon

#61

Post by boomboomsubban »

nimbius wrote: post #53

this might sound like a troll comment but its coming from someone with almost zero experience with raid. What is the purpose of ZFS in 2021 if we have hardware RAID and linux software RAID? BTRFS does RAID too. Why would people choose ZFS in 2021 if both Oracle and Open Source users have 2 competing ZFS? are they interoperable?

They are not interoperable but they're barely competing as Solaris is dead. Does Oracle Linux even offer Oracle ZFS? I assume they stick to btrfs considering they are the original developers.

RAID does not feature the data protection offered by a copy on write filesystem, and OpenZFS is the most stable and portable option.

Re: ZFS fans, rejoice – RAIDz expansion will be a thing soon

#62

Post by nix23 »

nimbius wrote: post #53

this might sound like a troll comment but its coming from someone with almost zero experience with raid. What is the purpose of ZFS in 2021 if we have hardware RAID and linux software RAID? BTRFS does RAID too. Why would people choose ZFS in 2021 if both Oracle and Open Source users have 2 competing ZFS? are they interoperable?

It's pretty easy, having lots of experience with HW-Raid and SW-Raid, software it the way to go because:

1. Do you trust Firmware...i don't, i can tell you storys about freaking out san's...never had that with solaris or freebsd and zfs.

2. Why having a additional abstraction layer, HW Raid caching vs FS-Caching, no transparency for error correction, not smart raid rebuild etc.

the list can go on and on, but HW-Raid is a thing of the past (exceptions are specialized san's etc)

Re: ZFS fans, rejoice – RAIDz expansion will be a thing soon

#63

Post by nix23 »

the8472 wrote: post #32
d33lio wrote: post #2

I'll believe it when I see it, why anyone uses BTRFs (UnRaid or any other form of software raid that isn't ZFS) is still beyond me. At least when we're not talking SSD's ;) ZFS is incredible, curious to mess around with these new features!

btrfs does have some advantages over zfs - no data duplicated between page cache and arc - no upgrade problems on rolling distros - balance allows restructuring the array - offline dedup, no need for huge dedup tables - ability to turn off checksumming for specific files - O_DIRECT support - reflink copy - fiemap - easy to resize

But the main thing of an fs is to preserve your files...btrfs can't even check the most important point.

Re: ZFS fans, rejoice – RAIDz expansion will be a thing soon

#64

Post by eptcyka »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #47
eptcyka wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had 3 catastrophic BTRFS failures. In two cases, the root filesystem just ran out of space and there was no way to repair the partition. Last time, the partition was just rendered unmountable after a reboot. All data was lost.No such thing has ever happened with ZFS for me.

I've had some annoying failures too. But I wasn't listing pros and cons, I was explaining that there are some very notable features that ZFS lacks.

That's fair. However, when listing notable features for the sake of comparing software, I think it's important to also list other characteristics of a given piece of software. If we were to compare software by feature sets alone, one might argue that Windows has the most features, so Windows must be best OS.

Re: ZFS fans, rejoice – RAIDz expansion will be a thing soon

#65

Post by nix23 »

imiric wrote: post #37
d33lio wrote: post #2

I'll believe it when I see it, why anyone uses BTRFs (UnRaid or any other form of software raid that isn't ZFS) is still beyond me. At least when we're not talking SSD's ;) ZFS is incredible, curious to mess around with these new features!

Simplicity. There's a lot of complexity in ZFS I'd rather not depend on, and because it does so many things it's a big investment and liability to switch to. While I understand why it would be useful in a corporate setting, for personal use I've found the combination of LUKS+LVM+SnapRAID to work well and don't see the benefit of switching to ZFS. Two of those are core Linux features, and SnapRAID has been rock solid,…

> LUKS+LVM+SnapRAID

+ your fs

Yeah that sounds like a lot less complexity

Re: ZFS fans, rejoice – RAIDz expansion will be a thing soon

#66

Post by cogman10 »

j1elo wrote: post #41
imiric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplicity. There's a lot of complexity in ZFS I'd rather not depend on, and because it does so many things it's a big investment and liability to switch to. While I understand why it would be useful in a corporate setting, for personal use I've found the combination of LUKS+LVM+SnapRAID to work well and don't see the benefit of switching to ZFS. Two of those are core Linux features, and SnapRAID has been rock solid,…

What about if you were just starting today, with 0 knowledge about basically anything related to storage and how to do it right? That's my case, I'm learning before setting up a cheap home lab and a NAS, and I'm wondering if biting into ZFS is just the best option that I have given today's ecosystem.

I dove into ZFS for my home lab as a relative novice.

It's not terrible, but there are a few new concepts to come to grips with. Once you have them down, it's not terrible.

If you don't plan on raiding, IMO, ZFS is overkill. The check-summing is nice, but you can get that from other filesystems.

Maintenance is fairly straight forward. I've even done a disk swap without too much fuss.

The biggest issue I had was setting up raid z on root with ubuntu was a PITA (at the time at least, March of this year). I ended up switching over to debian instead. Once setup, things have been pretty smooth.

Re: ZFS fans, rejoice – RAIDz expansion will be a thing soon

#67

Post by nix23 »

mixedCase wrote: post #57
d33lio wrote: post #2

I'll believe it when I see it, why anyone uses BTRFs (UnRaid or any other form of software raid that isn't ZFS) is still beyond me. At least when we're not talking SSD's ;) ZFS is incredible, curious to mess around with these new features!

I just put two 8TB drives into btrfs because it's a home server, I can't provision things up front. One day I may put a third 8TB drive and turn this RAID1 into RAID5. btrfs lets me do that, zfs doesn't, simple as. One day I may switch the whole thing to bcachefs, which I've donated and am looking forwards to. For the moment, btrfs will have to do. EDIT: downvoted by... the filesystem brigade?

>RAID5

I wish you lots of fun with that on btrfs :)

Edit:

https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Status

RAID56 Unstable n/a write hole still exists

> treated as if I'm storing business data or precious memories without backups, guess I'm just dumb

No your not, but don't use unstable features in a filesystem

Re: ZFS fans, rejoice – RAIDz expansion will be a thing soon

#68

Post by imiric »

j1elo wrote: post #41
imiric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplicity. There's a lot of complexity in ZFS I'd rather not depend on, and because it does so many things it's a big investment and liability to switch to. While I understand why it would be useful in a corporate setting, for personal use I've found the combination of LUKS+LVM+SnapRAID to work well and don't see the benefit of switching to ZFS. Two of those are core Linux features, and SnapRAID has been rock solid,…

What about if you were just starting today, with 0 knowledge about basically anything related to storage and how to do it right? That's my case, I'm learning before setting up a cheap home lab and a NAS, and I'm wondering if biting into ZFS is just the best option that I have given today's ecosystem.

I would still go with a collection of composable tools rather than something monolithic as ZFS, and to avoid the learning curve. But again, for personal use. If you're planning to use ZFS in a professional setting it might be good to experiment with it at home.

Re: ZFS fans, rejoice – RAIDz expansion will be a thing soon

#69

Post by imiric »

nix23 wrote: post #65
imiric wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simplicity. There's a lot of complexity in ZFS I'd rather not depend on, and because it does so many things it's a big investment and liability to switch to. While I understand why it would be useful in a corporate setting, for personal use I've found the combination of LUKS+LVM+SnapRAID to work well and don't see the benefit of switching to ZFS. Two of those are core Linux features, and SnapRAID has been rock solid,…

> LUKS+LVM+SnapRAID + your fs Yeah that sounds like a lot less complexity

ZFS has all of these features and more. If I don't need those extra features by definition it's a less complex system.

Using composable tools is also better from a maintenance standpoint. If tomorrow SnapRAID stops working, I can replace just that component with something else without affecting the rest of the system.

Post reply on HN