Hopefully Simple Question: ZFS or UFS for Striped/RAID0 System...

[bbddpp]

I'm new to FreeNAS (just installed 8.3 yesterday) and learning a ton this weekend as I set my system up, but I still in reading for hours haven't seen someone admitting to doing what I am doing, so I am trying to make sure I do the best/right thing here.

I'm going to be tossing a bunch of drives of different brands/sizes into my FreeNAS box as a media server for XBMC and iTunes. I don't care about redundancy or replication. I don't need one big pool of data in a single share, several shares and pools are fine.

I can live with it if one of the many disks fails and I lose the data JUST on that drive. However, what I can't live with is if one fails, and I lose the data on ALL the disks in the NAS.

That said, I think ZFS is out of the question for me, as if I use any form of ZFS, in a RAID0 situation, if any of the 5-6 drives I put in fails, I lose the entire data pool. I'd love to have used ZFS, but I don't have any interest in the lost space due to RAID1/2 nor enough of the same drives to make it work well, anyway.

So, what I think I need to do is simply use UFS, correct? And final question, before I go down that road - If I use UFS in a striped/RAID0 situation, I can still install MySQL on this box via a plugin jail type situation? All the the tutorials I see about creating a jail to run plugins are assuming I have a ZFS file system to create a ZFS database but I'd like to do the same on one of my UFS disks.

 

[bbddpp]

Upon further consideration, I think what I'm more looking to do is JBOD, so I misspoke about RAID 0. Really I want this system to act the same as a system that I installed a desktop OS like Windows or OSX on, and share out each drive individually.

The reason I want to use FreeNAS is so I can share the data in multiple ways to different system types on my network. Some are OSX, some are Windows, some Linux, I want them to all have access via different protocols. I figured a lightweight NAS is the best way, even though I am not interested in a single pool of data or redundancy at this time.

Question remains the same though - Should I be using UFS and not even looking at ZFS given that I don't want to pool the drives together (due to the risk of total data loss if one drive fails) and that I don't want any RAID redundancy at all?

 

[ProtoSD]

Both will let you do what you want, you just have to pay attention when you add a disk that you don't add it to an existing pool, which will then end up striping that pool across the disks you put in it. ZFS will let you create single disk pools, just create a new pool for each disk.

There is a lot of bias toward using ZFS for plugins, but they should work on either file system. Since you're going to create a bunch of different pools for each disk, you should also be able to mix and match zfs and ufs, then you can decide where you want your plugin jail to live.

 

[bbddpp]

Thanks for the reply. I wasn't aware that I could create a single pool for each disk using ZFS. I'll read up some more and mess around with it.

Much thanks.

 

[Stephens]

Please reconsider why you want to use FreeNAS. What will it give you over just sharing the drives with a Windows server? It appears you're taking on a bunch of learning and opportunity for mistakes to gain multiprotocol support. OSX and Linux machines can already use CIFS/Samba to access Windows shares. I'm a big fan of FreeNAS, but I still maintain FreeNAS isn't the solution for all storage needs.

 

[bbddpp]

Thanks, I appreciate your candor. I did consider the same thing. The big reason I think is that I wanted a box that could easily share out in AFP, CIFS/Samba and NFS all at once. I also like the idea that it can house a MySQL database for all my XBMC boxes. The main purpose of this box is that it will serve media up to a variety of XBMC machines in my home. Those will all use NFS. However I also want it to serve up my music folder to my Apple box using AFP, and to be able to be written to via CIFS from my Win8 machine. Plus I need every possible SATA port so the idea of something running on it that can boot from USB stick is important.

I don't know if it's still the best case ever for setting up FreeNAS, I realize the biggest benefit is RAID redundancy, and I eventually may go there, but it still seems like a lightweight NAS is the best fit for what I wanted to do...Maybe I could have searched for other free NAS OS'es but I noticed FreeNAS at least had regular updates and a lot of support from fine folks like yourselves in this forum.

That said, if you think I can do what I was describing with something simpler, I'm all ears, too. Windows Server just seemed like TOO much and I believe was limited in protocols, plus can't run off a USB stick I don't think. ;)

 

[Stephens]

There are ways to boot Win7 from a USB flash drive but I wouldn't recommend it. Windows 7 accesses (read and write) the boot drive too often.

If I were in your situation, I'd look at platform neutral places like the XBMC forums to see how others are addressing your situation (it's not unique). I'm not saying you can't use FreeNAS to accomplish your goals, but I just hope if you use ZFS you realize that it doesn't have anywhere near the recovery tools of other file systems. Things like undelete, unformat, etc. which we take for granted with NTFS (or even UFS) are dead in the water using ZFS. ZFS/FreeBSD/FreeNAS are completely different animals from Windows. I personally can't imagine that I would have taken it on if I didn't have very specific needs met by the product better than any other product. Windows also has a much larger base of supported hardware. It'll also be very easy to misconfigure your pools and end up with something you didn't want.

Anyway, I do wish you well. I just get concerned when I see someone who may be asking how to use a screwdriver as a hammer. Sure it can be done, but maybe it'd be better to use a hammer.