<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">I've been happy running a home NAS since 2001ish on Solaris, Opensolaris, Linux. </div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">The best thing I did was switch from mdadm/LVM to ZFS so I could change "partitions" on the fly. Auto snapshotting every hour/day/week/month was a nice addition I missed from Netapp. The ECC & self correction of ZFS is very important to me. ZFS has survived power hits, losing a core on a dual core CPU (!) and bad ZoL upgrades (early CentOS versions). I used to make the OS use its own RAID1 (not ZFS), but I don't need the uptime vs power. I can easily reinstall the OS again.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">I had RAIDZ and upgraded my disks from gigabytes up to terabytes a few times. I now use 2 disk RAID1 blocks of 4TB or 6TB drives. When I want to upgrade, I only need to buy 2 drives at a time. 4TB has been a sweet spot for *me*. $/GB, availability of non-SMR drives and needing only 1 parity to keep 4TB safe for the data.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">Initially, I put drives into the system. I found SATA cages that put 4 drives into where the floppies would go are better.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">When I ran out of space, you can run regular SATA cables outside the box to a drive. No special eSATA needed. I used an old PC chassis w/ its own power supply to power the drives. I've since found cages that have fans and use them w/ an external power supply. There are SATA cards w/ the single connector to 4 sata ports that cut down clutter.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">I share filesystems as NFS, SMB and a web server. My chromebook or android can use those or SFTP mount to get to things.<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">I have KVM to run a music server, jellyfin, search engine and ssh gateway. I can move those VMs to a different system and NFS/SMB mount the NAS.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">jellyfin replaces plex & does DLNA/uPNP. I'm planning on paperless-ng and a photo organizer in VMs on another system.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">I have a 3 GHz sandy lake quad cpu with 24 GB RAM which was an upgrade from an athlon dual core w/ 8GB and a bad core :-) that worked well for years with only the SSH gateway VM. I have a UPS that will auto shutdown after a 5 minute power loss. Because that's what a UPS is for: to ensure a clean shutdown if a generator or the power grid isn't supplying power.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:trebuchet ms,sans-serif">btrfs looks good (only with RAID1 IMO) but I'll stick with ZFS. When I installed Fedora on my 10yr old i5 with 8GB RAM, it chose btrfs. It was much slower than the previous Fedora with ext4 so I reinstalled it with ext4. I don't see much point in using btrfs/zfs on a single drive.</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 11:26 AM Ben Scott <<a href="mailto:dragonhawk@gmail.com">dragonhawk@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Hi all,<br>
<br>
We haven't had a really good flamewar ^W discussion on here in far too long...<br>
<br>
SUMMARY<br>
<br>
Btfrs vs ZFS. I was wondering if others would like to share their<br>
opinions on either or both? Or something else entirely? (Maybe you<br>
just don't feel alive if you're not compiling your kernel from<br>
patches?) Especially cool would be recent comparisons of two or more.<br>
<br>
I'll provide an info dump of my plans below, but I do so mainly as<br>
discussion-fodder. Don't feel obligated to address my scenario in<br>
particular. Of course, commentary on anything in particular that<br>
seems like a good/bad/cool idea is still welcome.<br>
<br>
RECEIVED WISDOM<br>
<br>
This is the stuff every article says. I rarely find anything that goes deeper.<br>
<br>
- ZFS has been around/stable/whatever longer<br>
- btfrs has been on Linux longer<br>
- btfrs is GPL, ZFS is CDDL or whatever<br>
- Licensing kept ZFS off Linux for a while<br>
- ZFS is available on major Linux distros now<br>
- People say one is faster, but disagree on which one<br>
- Oracle is a bag of dicks<br>
- ZFS is easier to pronounce<br>
<br>
For both, by coupling the filesystem layer and the block layer, we get<br>
a lot of advantages, especially for things like snapshots and<br>
deduplication. The newcomers also get you things like checksums for<br>
every block, fault-tolerance over heterogenous physical devices, more<br>
encryption and compression options. Faster, bigger, longer, lower,<br>
wider, etc., etc. More superlatives than any other filesystem.<br>
<br>
MY SCENARIO<br>
<br>
I'm going to be building a new home server soon. Historically I've<br>
used Linux RAID and LVM and EXT2/3/4/5/102, but all the cool kids are<br>
using smarter filesystems these days. I should really get with the<br>
times. They do seem to confer a lot of advantages, at least on paper.<br>
<br>
USE CASES<br>
<br>
User community is me and my girlfriend and a motley collection of<br>
computing devices from multiple millenia. Administrator community is<br>
me.<br>
<br>
Mostly plain old network file storage. Mixed use within that. I'm a<br>
data hoarder.<br>
<br>
All sorts of stuff I've downloaded over the years, some not even from<br>
the Internet (ZMODEM baby!). So large numbers of large write-once<br>
files. "Large" has changed over the years, from something that fills<br>
a floppy diskette to something that fills a DVD, but they don't change<br>
once written. ISO images, tarballs, music and photo collections<br>
(FLAC, MP3, JPEG).<br>
<br>
Also large numbers of small write-once files. I've got 20 GB of mail<br>
archives in maildir format, one file per message, less than 4K per<br>
file for the old stuff (modern HTML mail is rather bloated). These<br>
generally don't change once written either, but there are lots of<br>
them. Some single directories have over 200 K files.<br>
<br>
Backups of my user systems. Currently accomplished via rsnapshot and<br>
rsync (or ROBOCOPY for 'doze). So small to medium-small files, but<br>
changing and updating and hardlinking and moving a lot. With a<br>
smarter filesystem I can likely dispense with rsnapshot, but I doubt<br>
I'm going to move away from plain-old-files-as-backup-storage any time<br>
soon. (rsync might conceivably be replaced with a smarter network<br>
filesystem someday, but likely not soon.)<br>
<br>
ANTI USE CASES<br>
<br>
Not a lot of mass-market videos -- the boob tube is one area where I<br>
let others do it for me. (Roku, Netflix, Blu-ray, etc.)<br>
<br>
No plans to network mount home directories for my daily-driver PCs.<br>
For laptops especially that's problematic (and sorting apps<br>
(particularly browsers) that can copy with a distributed filesystem<br>
seems unlikely to pay off).<br>
<br>
Not planning on any serious hosting of VMs or containers or complex<br>
application software on this box. I can't rule it out entirely for<br>
(especially as an experiment), but this is mainly intended to be a<br>
NAS-type server. It will run NFS, Samba, SSH, rsync. It might run<br>
some mail daemons (SMTP, IMAP) just to make accessing archives easier,<br>
but it won't be the public-facing MX for anything.<br>
<br>
It's unlikely to run any point-and-drool administration (web) GUIs. I<br>
have a set of config files I've been carrying around with me since I<br>
kept them on floppy diskette, and they've served me well. Those that<br>
like them, more power to you, but they're not for me. I inevitably<br>
bump into their limitations and have to go outside them anyway.<br>
<br>
I've tried a few consumer NAS appliances and have generally been<br>
disappointed. It's the same as the GUI thing above, except I hit the<br>
limits sooner and in more ways. Some of them have really disgusting<br>
software internals. (A shame, because some of the hardware is<br>
appealing, especially in terms of watts and price.)<br>
<br>
I don't want to put this on somebody else's computer.<br>
<br>
HARDWARE<br>
<br>
I'm shooting for a super compact PC chassis, mini-ITX mainboard, 4 x<br>
3.5-inch hot swap bays, SATA interfaces, x86-64 processor. Initially<br>
it will be two spinning disks. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 to<br>
6 TB effective. The disks will be relatively slow, favoring lower<br>
price-per-GB and less heat over performance. This is bulk data<br>
storage. The user PCs have SSDs. If fancy filesystems weren't a<br>
thing, it would start with two mirrored drives, with plans to expand<br>
to RAID 10 (stripes across mirrors), and multiple LVM logical volumes.<br>
<br>
Off-site off-line backup will be accomplished with one or more<br>
physical disks attached to the system, sync'ed at some level (be it<br>
rsync or filesystem or whatever). Initially it will be a bare disk<br>
and a hot swap bay, with options for eSATA or USB in the future.<br>
<br>
Specific processor and RAM are undecided. I'm not looking to run 40<br>
VMs, and lower watts would be nice. At the same time, I want it to be<br>
able to handle what I throw at it, and I know the fancy filesystems<br>
can be more demanding, plus I keep meaning to set up plain text<br>
indexing/search.<br>
<br>
-- Ben<br>
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</blockquote></div>