Difference between Volumes and Datasets

[Skyfox]

Hi, another noob question :)

What's the difference between Volumes and Datasets?

I'm trying to figure out the best way to set up my device, and was going to settle on 1 volume with several Datasets in it?

What would be the advantage (or disadvantage) of setting it up as, for example, 3 Volumes instead.

Thanks in advance!

 

[KevinM]

Hi, another noob question :)

What's the difference between Volumes and Datasets?

I'm trying to figure out the best way to set up my device, and was going to settle on 1 volume with several Datasets in it?

What would be the advantage (or disadvantage) of setting it up as, for example, 3 Volumes instead.

Thanks in advance!

A volume is a collection of disks configured as UFS, ZFS RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3, etc., and a dataset is a filesystem within that volume. Generally what I've found easiest is to create one big volume and create datasets inside of it. This way you have one large pool where you can create, resize, remove, etc., filesystems on the fly.

At home I have six drives configured as one ZFS RAIDZ2 array, and from there I carved up the storage into various datasets. At work I have one volume of 36 drives configured as 6 6-drive RAIDZ2 vdevs.

I also recommend that you use ZFS if your hardware is up to it. More about hardware recommendations here.

 

[Skyfox]

Thanks for the reply... 36drives.. nice!

I think what threw me was that once I created a volume, it seemed to have an option to create another volume within that volume.

Thanks for the advice, I set it up as ZFS RAIDZ1 as I only have 4 disks. Have 8GB of ram and seem to get read speeds of 105MB/s which, considering my old Buffalo NAS drive used to manage 25MB/s, I am happy with.

I'm currently trying to figure out the way the permissions work, and there seems to be a good diagram in the How-To forum.

Thanks again!

 

[panz]

Hi, another noob question :)

What's the difference between Volumes and Datasets?

http://pthree.org/2012/12/04/zfs-administration-part-i-vdevs/

 

[Neeraj Saraf]

A volume is a collection of disks configured as UFS, ZFS RAIDZ2, RAIDZ3, etc., and a dataset is a filesystem within that volume. Generally what I've found easiest is to create one big volume and create datasets inside of it. This way you have one large pool where you can create, resize, remove, etc., filesystems on the fly.

At home I have six drives configured as one ZFS RAIDZ2 array, and from there I carved up the storage into various datasets. At work I have one volume of 36 drives configured as 6 6-drive RAIDZ2 vdevs.

I also recommend that you use ZFS if your hardware is up to it. More about hardware recommendations here.

Hi KevinM, I am very new to FreeNAS and this was pretty well explained. Are pool and volume the same thing?

Thanks
Neeraj

 

[Bidule0hm]

Yes, in the GUI volume = pool.

 

[Neeraj Saraf]

Hey man...thanks for the super prompt response....appreciate it..:)

 

[Bidule0hm]

You're welcome ;)

 

[mappo]

So let me see if I understood KevinM's explanation.
In my setup I'm much more concerned with my private files (photos, etc.) than with media files (movies & tv).
I could set up a single-drive volume, turn it into a dataset and use that for media.
But for private files I should use a multiple-drives volume.

Is that the correct line of reasoning? I don't want to "waste" disk on redundancy and other goodness on the media files.