Windows storage server vs zfs

You can also mix parity levels and tiers, e. That helps tremendously with write speeds. Another advantage over Freenas is the ability to easily add capacity. You can add disks to a zfs pool, but, crucially, zfs does nothing to re-balance the storage.

For example, if you have 8 drives running mirrored pairs that start get full and you add another pair, because the other 8 drives were mostly full nearly all of the new writes will go to the new drives robbing you of the performance advantage you should get from using raid Server will re-balance existing data across all drives.

You can also empty out a drive prior to removing which could be useful. The Server: ESXi 6. The host is running esxi 6. For the file copy tests, I created a RAM disk to make sure that wouldn't be a bottleneck. Last edited: Oct 18, Reactions: Bert , Hjalti Atlason , ridney and 4 others. Patrick Administrator Staff member. Dec 21, 12, 5, Super write-up ColPanic! Jul 25, 50 Thanks for that ColPanic , I'm really looking forward to your testing with parity and no-cache as it was virtually useless in R2.

Reactions: Patrick. RobertFontaine Active Member. Dec 17, 43 55 Winterpeg, Canuckistan. Silly question but is there still active development in the OpenZFS space?

I remember the big hurrah when it kicked off a couple of years ago but I don't see much activity in github when I look at the logs. There's still a lot of development by the Illumos team illumos-gate and they upstream regularly: Aug 16 to Sept Excluding merges, 28 authors have pushed 54 commits to master and 54 commits to all branches. On master, files have changed and there have been 7, additions and 94, deletions.

Larson Member. Nov 10, 7 18 Thanks ColPanic! Very helpful since I've been going back an forth between these two platforms myself for my own home setup. Dec 31, 2, DE. Mar 18, 2, 32 Germany. Unless I missed something tiereing was only possible with refs, not with ntfs. Jan 4, 1, 63 Nov 25, 2, Portland, Oregon alexandarnarayan. I'd just do zfs and napp-it or freeNAS and enable cifs and call it a day.

Apr 21, 43 California, US. Mar 8, 88 14 8. I'm wondering why you would use the nvme drive for the os and not as the cache? Sent from my LG-H using Tapatalk. Dec 31, 2, DE. Last edited: Apr 5, Reactions: gigatexal and frogtech. It will do tiering but you can't 'pin' things to the cache tier, which is what your Powershell command does and what the author is trying to do in the post you linked. If you run some VMs from your storage that require high storage performance, it's an entirely different matter.

If during a rebuild the surviving member of a mirror fails the one disk in the pool that is taxed the most during rebuild you lose your pool. ZFS only rebuilds data. Legacy RAID just rebuilds every 'bit' on a drive. The latter takes longer than the former. So with legacy RAID, rebuild times depend on the size of a single drive, not on the number of drives in the array, no matter how much data you have stored on your array.

It took 5 hours to rebuild a 1 TB drive. If you would have used 4 TB drives, it would have taken 20 hours if I'm allowed to extrapolate. I did briefly touch this option in the article above.

I will address it again. The problem with this approach is twofold. First, you can't expand storage capacity as you need it. You need to replace all existing drives with larger ones. The procedure itself is also a bit cumbersome and time intensive.

You need to replace each drive one by one. And every time, you need to 'resilver' your VDEV. Only when all drives have been replaced you will be able to grow the size of your pool. If you are OK with this approach - and people have used it - it is a way to work around the 'ZFS-tax'. Either you go with mirrors or you accept the extra parity redundancy. It is not my goal to steer you away from ZFS. The above is true. But at a cost. That's what the majority of people do and I think it's a reasonable option.

I don't think you are taking crazy risks if you would do so. I would say: ZFS is clearly technically the better option , but those 'legacy' options are not so bad that you are taking unreasonable risks with your data. So using ZFS is the better option, it's up to you and your particular needs and circumstances to decide if using ZFS is worth it for you. Not standard, but I decided that I accept the risk. It doesn't make much sense to me. Just an example for illustration purposes.

Home Solar About. This fact is often overlooked, but it's very important when you are planning your build. ZFS does not allow this!