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

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

#91

Post by funcDropShadow »

imiric wrote: post #77
nix23 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since all those tools are from different dev's the system gets more complex. But hey if you really think that ZFS is to complex to hold 55 petabytes because it has to many potential bugs you should tell them: https://computing.llnl.gov/projects/zfs-lustre

Thankfully I don't have to manage 55 petabytes of data, but good luck to them. Did you miss the part where I mentioned "for personal use"? > Since all those tools are from different dev's the system gets more complex. I fail to see the connection there. Whether software is developed by a single entity or multiple developers has no relation to how complex the end user system will be. But many small tools focused on ju…

> Whether software is developed by a single entity or multiple developers has no relation to how complex the end user system will be.

The first part of this sentence is probably true, as far as I see, but the complexity of a system perceived by the user depends primarily on the "surface" of the system. That surface includes the UI, the documentation and important concepts you have to understand for effective usage of the system. And in that regard, ZFS wins hands down against LUKS + LVM + SnapRaid + your FS of choice. Some questions a user of that LVM stack has to answer, aren't even asked of a ZFS user. E.g. the question how to split the space between volumes or how to change the size of volumes.

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

#92

Post by jamiek88 »

qaq wrote: post #20
bsder wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe that the license was fine for macOS but when Oracle bought Sun that killed it cold. Jobs never liked anybody other than himself holding all the cards. Having Ellison and Oracle holding the keys to ZFS was just never going to fly.

Jobs and Ellison were really close friends

And also cold hearted clear eyed businessmen unlikely to allow friendship to affect their corporations.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall for some of those conversations.

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

#93

Post by Datagenerator »

rektide wrote: post #78
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?

No matter what happens, people will seemingly forever declare BTRFS is not as stable and not as safe. There's a status page that details what BTRFS thinks of itself[1], and I doubt any of the many people docking BTRFS have read or know or care what that page says. There is one issue still being worked out to completion, a "write hole" problem, involving two separate failures, an unplanned/power-loss shut-down, follow…

Netflix has been using ZFS in production for many years now. Unnamed research companies are using ZFS moving PB's of data. NetApp is FreeBSD based and was on the forefront of what we now call ZFS. I'm totally biased, designed many production critical systems with ZFS at it's core in one way or another. The power of ZFS send and receive function is tremendous to say the least, it beats any file based synchronizing methods.

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

#94

Post by znpy »

1980phipsi wrote: post #14

This will be very useful! TIL FreeNAS is now TrueNAS.

Actually there's more!

A new version of TrueNAS is in the works, it's called TrueNAS scale and it's going to be Linux-based (no more FreeBSD).

I'm frankly happy, because TrueNAS is great as a NAS operating system but I really wanted to run containers where my storage is and having to run a VM adds a really unnecessary overhead (plus, it's another machine to manage)

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

#95

Post by chasil »

webmobdev wrote: post #90
rektide wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what happens, people will seemingly forever declare BTRFS is not as stable and not as safe. There's a status page that details what BTRFS thinks of itself[1], and I doubt any of the many people docking BTRFS have read or know or care what that page says. There is one issue still being worked out to completion, a "write hole" problem, involving two separate failures, an unplanned/power-loss shut-down, follow…

One guess I can make for the "hate" BTRFS gets is probably because everyone loves their data and doesn't expect to "fight" with a file system to get access to it. E.g. Sailfish OS is perhaps the only mobile OS I know that uses / used BTRFS in production (and they adopted it nearly 6-7 years ago!). And some of its users have had issues with BTRFS in the earlier versions - https://together.jolla.com/questions/scope:all…

Suse uses btrfs in production for the root filesystem, and they have done so for years.

https://documentation.suse.com/sles/15-SP1/html/SLES-all/cha...

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

#96

Post by kurlberg »

tombert wrote: post #18
handrous wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "you need at least 32GB of memory and it has to be ECC, or don't even bother trying to use ZFS" crowd has done some serious harm to ZFS adoption. Sure, that's what you need if you want excellent data integrity guarantees and to use all of ZFS' advanced features. If you're fine with merely way-better-than-most-other-filesystems data integrity guarantees and using only most of ZFS' advanced features, you don't need…

I really don't know where the "You gotta have ECC RAM!" thing started. I've been running a ZFS RAID on Nvidia Jetson Nanos for years now and haven't had any issues at all with data integrity. I don't see why ZFS would be more prone to data integrity issues spawning from a lack of ECC than any other filesystem.

Years ago I saw it at:

https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/ecc-vs-non-ecc-ram...

(the gist of the scary story is that faulty ram while scrubbing might kill "everything".) However, in the end ECC appears to NOT be so important, e.g., see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23687895

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

#97

Post by j1elo »

cogman10 wrote: post #66
j1elo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 setti…

Two things I like from it, as per what I've read so far:

* Checksumming

* As you mention, easy maintenance

* Snapshots and how useful they are for backups

In the end what I value is stuff that works reliably, doesn't get in the way, and requiring minimal supervision. And in the particular case of FS, I'd like to adopt a system that helps avoid bitrot in my data.

Could you drop some names that you would consider as good alternatives of ZFS?

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

#98

Post by znpy »

_tom_ wrote: post #86
nickik wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the purpose of ZFS in 2021 if we have hardware RAID Hardware RAID is actually older then ZFS style software RAID. ZFS was specifically designed fix the issues with hardware RAID. The problem with Hardware RAID is that is has no ideas what going on on top of it, and even worse, its a mostly a bunch of closed-source fireware from a vendor. And they cost money. You can find lots of terrible story about those.…

> ZFS is far more battle tested. They say its stable now, but they had said that many times. It eat my data twice Did you mean "it ate my data" to apply to ZFS? Or did you mean BTRFS?

It was probably BTRFS.

I never fell for the BTRFS meme but many friends of mine did, and many of them ended up with a corrupted filesystem (and lost data).

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

#99

Post by chasil »

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

    - defragmentation

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

#100

Post by tombert »

oarsinsync wrote: post #55
tombert wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I remember reading that a few years ago. If I were running a server farm or something, then yeah, I'd probably use ECC memory, but I think if you're running a home server, then the argument that ZFS necessitates ECC more than Ext4 or Btrfs or XFS or whatever doesn't really seem to be accurate.

> the argument that ZFS necessitates ECC more than Ext4 or Btrfs or XFS or whatever doesn't really seem to be accurate Agreed. > If I were running a server farm or something, then yeah, I'd probably use ECC memory, but I think if you're running a home server Then you should still use ECC RAM, regardless of what filesystem you're using. No, really. ECC matters ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25622322 ) generall…

Fair enough, though AFAIK none of the SBC systems out there have ECC, and I generally use SBCs due to the low power consumption.
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