A piece of advice with ZFS, get the largest drives you can afford.
Expanding ZFS is painful and it’s wayyyyy easier to just start big then to grow big.
ZFS is also a RAM hog, max out your ram cause that.
If you want to add meta data caches, do it when you first build the array.
The L2-arc cache and SLOG don’t do what you think they will. Make sure you really understand them before you throw them on. They’re easy to take off though.
Last but certainly not least, ZFS is a money sink. It was made for enterprise solutions, meaning it benefits from more money being thrown at it than say XFS. Figure out what’s good enough and live with it.
That is a fair point, earlier I considered OpenMediaVault with a softraid and an LVM on top if it, but I take a lot of photos and have already seen bitrot in them, so I’d rather have some insurance for that.
I will in general avoid expanding filesystems, and simply decide that when I need more space to start building a new NAS, copy the data to it and repurpose the old NAS with larger drives or as a test machine.
Though this depends on how financially stable I am, I tend to buy parts over time…
What I’ve done is set up an UnRAID server with an XFS pool for my media pool and a ZFS pool for my photos, family videos and documents. The biggest advantage I see with UnRAID is that it’s designed from the ground up for buying parts over time. When my media pool gets full, buy a bigger disk, slam it in, let it rebuild. When my documents (ZFS) pool is full I move it to my media array, break the ZFS pool and rebuild it bigger.
As opposed to say a TrueNAS scale deployment with pure ZFS, where I would highly suggest that you spend the money upfront and buy the system your going to want tomorrow, not today.
Sure UnRAID’s ZFS is not as mature as almost every other NAS OS out there but it’s good enough. Plus I have my pictures and stuff in a proper 3-2-1 backup so I’m not too worried about bitrot.
A piece of advice with ZFS, get the largest drives you can afford.
Expanding ZFS is painful and it’s wayyyyy easier to just start big then to grow big.
ZFS is also a RAM hog, max out your ram cause that.
If you want to add meta data caches, do it when you first build the array.
The L2-arc cache and SLOG don’t do what you think they will. Make sure you really understand them before you throw them on. They’re easy to take off though.
Last but certainly not least, ZFS is a money sink. It was made for enterprise solutions, meaning it benefits from more money being thrown at it than say XFS. Figure out what’s good enough and live with it.
That is a fair point, earlier I considered OpenMediaVault with a softraid and an LVM on top if it, but I take a lot of photos and have already seen bitrot in them, so I’d rather have some insurance for that.
I will in general avoid expanding filesystems, and simply decide that when I need more space to start building a new NAS, copy the data to it and repurpose the old NAS with larger drives or as a test machine.
Though this depends on how financially stable I am, I tend to buy parts over time…
What I’ve done is set up an UnRAID server with an XFS pool for my media pool and a ZFS pool for my photos, family videos and documents. The biggest advantage I see with UnRAID is that it’s designed from the ground up for buying parts over time. When my media pool gets full, buy a bigger disk, slam it in, let it rebuild. When my documents (ZFS) pool is full I move it to my media array, break the ZFS pool and rebuild it bigger.
As opposed to say a TrueNAS scale deployment with pure ZFS, where I would highly suggest that you spend the money upfront and buy the system your going to want tomorrow, not today.
Sure UnRAID’s ZFS is not as mature as almost every other NAS OS out there but it’s good enough. Plus I have my pictures and stuff in a proper 3-2-1 backup so I’m not too worried about bitrot.