21–30 of 86 posts
I wrote the above article. I will try to answer any questions that I see here.
I have heard that ZFS (at least, ZFS on Linux) requires about 1 GB of memory for every 1 TB of storage. Is this an accurate statement? That's certainly a critical flaw for many use cases, though completely irrelevant for many others. If accurate, what's behind this requirement?
No, that's flat out not true. I've seen that metric thrown around when talking about the "dedup" feature of ZFS, but honestly, don't use dedup unless you know what you're doing. It's way to easy for things to go wrong otherwise.
I found an old ZFS disk laying around the other day (a few years old.. from when I was playing with zevo community edition ZFS and I had forgotten what I had stored on it) and I was interested in trying https://openzfsonosx.org so I installed it and mounted my disk up. It worked like a charm. I was pretty impressed. I kind of screwed myself over though because I to do a bunch of file cleanup that I was hoping to perh…
(1) http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/ars-wa...
I'm a bit confused. I always thought that proper use of ZFS required multiple drives just like RAID. Then I read an article where RAID was used with ZFS. Now I'm really confused so I'm taking the lazy way and asking here: is ZFS appropriate for a single drive system?
Sure, COW(copy on write), snapshots, error checksum on files, compression, support for SSD's. You just don't have redundancy.
I wrote the above article. I will try to answer any questions that I see here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's flat out not true. I've seen that metric thrown around when talking about the "dedup" feature of ZFS, but honestly, don't use dedup unless you know what you're doing. It's way to easy for things to go wrong otherwise.
Ah ha! Thanks. Data deduplication. Well, yeah, that makes sense to me. Thank you very much for clearing that up.
There's been talk in the developer community about ways to address the usability of dedup, but so far nothing has gone further than small prototypes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, COW(copy on write), snapshots, error checksum on files, compression, support for SSD's. You just don't have redundancy.
I thought the error checking (scrubbing) only works if you have multiple drives set up in a RAID.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Care to elaborate?
Zpool is a great feature. On top of the dozen(s) of amazing features in ZFS. The problem is, and ZFS admits this: If you don't run ECC ram Zpool can "accidentally" your whole hard drive (bit of a joke there, it can corrupt your drive as it attempts to correct bit rot that never happened). This happens a lot more often then we really care to think about. (Ram corruption) For most day-to-day linux users who are just us…
I've heard this but I haven't actually confirmed anywhere official that ZFS will try to scrub your data due to a parity flip in ram values. Where in the manuals do they talk about it? (I'm actually curious about if it's just a rumor or if it's acknowledged)