Freenas, ZFS and MergeFS/UnionFS?

el_pedriyo

Explorer
Joined
Jun 24, 2018
Messages
65
Hello,

Just wanted to ask, if someone has achieved to run ZFS and mergefs/unionfs with freenas, or if we are able to do it.
Now, why do I want this? As people will tell me that ZFS already places the disks into a pool. That's the ongoing problem, and thats why I am searching for a different solution. The plan is to have a system as UNRAID, which means I can loadbalance/split my data through my disks, like a RAID0, but without losing all the content if 1 drive fails (I know what a RAID0 is and what are the results is 1 disk fails, thats why I have enough backups, but don't want to have parity disk), but at the same time with the benefit, that only the drive containing that file will be spinning.

Thanks in advance :D
 

el_pedriyo

Explorer
Joined
Jun 24, 2018
Messages
65
Also, wanted to say, that I will probably also dissabling deduplication, as at the moment I have not enough RAM to support all my TB of data
 

sretalla

Powered by Neutrality
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Jan 1, 2016
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9,702
No. Nobody will be doing that with FreeNAS.

What you can have is either a stripe (not exacly a stripe in reality, but not mergerfs in that all disks will always spin when the pool is active) or a stripe of VDEVs of multiple drives of any one type... or a single VDEV of a type other than stripe (mirror, RAIDZ1,2,3).

ZFS is the only option on FreeNAS and it has no way to mix with mergerfs.

If you want that, use UNRAID or Openmediavault.

If you are really in love with FreeNAS for everything else it does (like protecting your data like no other filesystem will), you could walk the very dificult road of splitting all your content into different pools and sharing it out individually. Then play with the Spinpid scripts to spin down the drives not being used.

Also, deduplication is not often used due to the practical limitations and marginal benefits in most use cases. You're probably right to turn it off if you continue with FreeNAS.
 

SweetAndLow

Sweet'NASty
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Nov 6, 2013
Messages
6,421
Freenas will probably use Linux as the base OS at some point. This will be years away though.
 

jgreco

Resident Grinch
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May 29, 2011
Messages
18,681
Freenas will probably use Linux as the base OS at some point. This will be years away though.

Perhaps. But it could also turn the other way around. Linux has a lot of negatives, including the whole not-being-truly-free software (copyleft-vs-copycenter argument).

There's a vaguely interesting thread over on openbsd-misc right now about Hyberbola GNU Linux intending to drop the Linux kernel over perceived issues such as DRM/HDCP, Rust, etc.

There's probably a good argument to be made that the platform differences over time really aren't that huge. Most of the time when I ask people to identify the differences between FreeBSD 9 and 12, they can't give me a meaningful example, and lots of people who think Linux is different than FreeBSD point mainly to userland differences.
 

Tigersharke

BOfH in User's clothing
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May 18, 2016
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I believe that to switch to Linux would involve significantly more work, simply because they'd need to do some maintenance work on EVERY component that goes into FreeNAS, not just primarily the portion that holds FreeNAS all together with its GUI. FreeBSD does a good job at keeping its ports tree updated, with limited breakage, and it is one mostly unified community. Depending on what a LinuxNAS dev team might pick and choose from what is best among multiple distros, they'd still need to expend effort to keep them all coexisting. LinuxNAS would be a distro itself.
 
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