I've just rebuilt my little home server (mostly for samba, plus a little bit of docker for kids to play with). It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...? I see it popping up more and more but I just can't see the benefits for occasional use.
FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
11–20 of 54 posts
Re: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
#12Is zfs really worth the hassle, for someone who does not have time to play "home sysadmin" more than once or twice a year? I've just rebuilt my little home server (mostly for samba, plus a little bit of docker for kids to play with). It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...? I see it popping…
It definitely worth the hassle. But if everything works fine for you now, don't bother. ZFS is not going away and you can learn it later.
Re: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
#13When setting up root-on-ZFS on FreeBSD, it's worth knowing about boot environments (a concept originally from Solaris): * https://klarasystems.com/articles/managing-boot-environments... * https://wiki.freebsd.org/BootEnvironments * https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bectl * https://dan.langille.org/category/open-source/freebsd/bectl/ * https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/03/14/zfs-boot-environme... It lets you…
- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/11/25/zfs-boot-environme...
Re: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
#14Is zfs really worth the hassle, for someone who does not have time to play "home sysadmin" more than once or twice a year? I've just rebuilt my little home server (mostly for samba, plus a little bit of docker for kids to play with). It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...? I see it popping…
Snapshots on ZFS are extremely cheap, since it works on the block level, so snapshots every hour or even 15 minutes are now doable if you so wish. Combine with weekly or monthly snapshots that can be replicated off-site, and you have a pretty robust storage system.
This is all home sysadmin stuff to be sure, but even if you just use it as a plain filesystem, the checksum integrity guarantees are worth the price of admission IMO.
FWIW, software RAID like ZFS mirrors or mdm is often superior to hardware raid especially for home use. If your raid controller goes blooey, which does happen, unless you have the exact same controller to replace it, you run a chance of not being able to mount your drives. Even very basic computers are fast enough to saturate the drives in software these days.
Re: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
#15Is zfs really worth the hassle, for someone who does not have time to play "home sysadmin" more than once or twice a year? I've just rebuilt my little home server (mostly for samba, plus a little bit of docker for kids to play with). It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...? I see it popping…
Re: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
#16Is zfs really worth the hassle, for someone who does not have time to play "home sysadmin" more than once or twice a year? I've just rebuilt my little home server (mostly for samba, plus a little bit of docker for kids to play with). It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...? I see it popping…
Re: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
#17When setting up root-on-ZFS on FreeBSD, it's worth knowing about boot environments (a concept originally from Solaris): * https://klarasystems.com/articles/managing-boot-environments... * https://wiki.freebsd.org/BootEnvironments * https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=bectl * https://dan.langille.org/category/open-source/freebsd/bectl/ * https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/03/14/zfs-boot-environme... It lets you…
Sounds a lot like the A/B update method used widely in Android and to a lesser extend for embedded GNU/Linux OTA updates. But it uses two distinct boot partitions. Since ZFS is involved here, I assume that boot environments take advantage of its copy-on-write mechanism to avoid duplicating the entire boot dataset. NixOS and Guix use a concept called 'system generations' to do the same without the support of the files…
Well, there's https://github.com/nixos-bsd/nixbsd :)
Re: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
#18Is zfs really worth the hassle, for someone who does not have time to play "home sysadmin" more than once or twice a year? I've just rebuilt my little home server (mostly for samba, plus a little bit of docker for kids to play with). It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...? I see it popping…
Re: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
#19Is zfs really worth the hassle, for someone who does not have time to play "home sysadmin" more than once or twice a year? I've just rebuilt my little home server (mostly for samba, plus a little bit of docker for kids to play with). It has a hardware raid1 enclosure, with 2TB formatted as ext4, and the really important stuff is sent to the cloud every night. Should I honestly bother learning zfs...? I see it popping…
Backups using zfs snapshots are pretty nice; you can pretty easily do incremental updates. zfs scrub is great to have. FreeBSD UFS also has snapshots, but doesn't have a mechanism to check data integrity: fsck checks for well formed metadata only. I don't think ext4 has snapshots or data integrity checking, but I haven't looked at it much.
There are articles and people claiming you need ECC to run zfs or that you need an unreasonable amount of memory. ECC is nice to have, but running ZFS without ECC isn't worse than running any other filesystem without ECC; and you only really need a large amount of ram if you run with deduplication enabled, but very few use cases benefit from deduplication, so the better advice is to ensure you don't enable dedup. I wouldn't necessarily run zfs on something with actually small memory like a router, but then those usually have a specialized flash filesystem and limited writes anyway.
Re: FreeBSD: Home NAS, part 1 – configuring ZFS mirror (RAID1)
#20This is getting lots of upvotes and rightfully so. I think people would love more posts about FreeBSD: especially about ZFS and bhyve (the FreeBSD hypervisor). It's a bit sad that this Lenovo ThinkCentre ain't using ECC. I use and know ZFS is good but I'd prefer to run it on a machine supporting ECC. I never tried FreeBSD but I'm reading more and more about it and it looks like although FreeBSD has always had its reg…
I'll take ZFS without ECC over hardware RAID with ECC any day.