migrating from mergerfs thoughts?

[sqlazer]

Hi there

I currently have a Dell R720XD with two 6TB hard drives, two 8TB hard drives, one 18TB hard drive, and two 1TB enterprise solid state drives for incoming write caches, on a 10gbe network. They're a mixture of SAS and SATA drives.

On the software side, I'm running Proxmox and my storage server is a debian vm running mergerfs sans parity, as all I've been storing on the array has been re-downloadable media. mergerfs has been great for that, but now that I'm branching out and need a place to store stuff I really really dont wanna lose. Stuff like personal documents, backups, etc. I'm attempting to evaluate using TrueNAS SCALE for my use case.

I'm a software engineer, I know my way around linux systems, been using linux since the late nineties, but I'm a ZFS newbie. Does ZFS support this level of heterogeniality? Even if it does, does it make sense to use this set of drives in the context of TrueNAS/ZFS?

 

[Arwen]

The equivalent of RAID-5/6 for ZFS is RAID-Z1/2 which requires similar sized disks. Any extra disk space in a RAID-Zx group because of mismatched sizes is temporarily ignored. You can later swap out the smaller disks with larger to "grow" the RAID-Zx group, (ZFS RAID-Zx groups are called vDevs, Virtual Devices).

ZFS also supports Mirrors, which individual vDevs can be different sizes, (vDev 1 could be a pair of 6TB disks, while vDev 2 could be a pair of 8TB disks). But, with larger disks, more redundancy is suggested...

I would recommend reading up on both what TrueNAS & ZFS are and can do, as they are not the perfect tools for all uses. See the top of the forum page for "Resources". Their are dozens, though many won't apply for you, lots are appropriate for new users. For example;

Welcome to TrueNAS SCALE - Beginners Intro

Since mid 2021 we have had many new users of TrueNAS wanting to try SCALE. Here are some things that are helpful for new TrueNAS SCALE users to know; SCALE is a specialized & targeted OS based on a Linux distro. However, SCALE is NOT a Linux distro, and updates are by full replacement with a...

www.truenas.com

Resource - "Absolutely must virtualize TrueNAS!" ... a guide to not completely losing your data.

[---- 2024/01/16: Still relevant. Virtualization really doesn't change much. Updates made as appropriate. ----] [---- 2018/02/27: This is still as relevant as ever. As PCIe-Passthru has matured, fewer problems are reported. I've updated some...

www.truenas.com

I have to waste an entire drive just for booting?

This resource was originally created by user: jgreco on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. Please DM this account or comment in this thread to claim it. With the advent of TrueNAS Scale, we seem to be getting a large number of people from the Linux community who are not quite grasping what...

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Terminology and Abbreviations Primer

We realize that new users have a lot to learn when they come to FreeNAS. There's a certain amount of confusion added to discussions when users pick random/approximate terms to describe things. I've spent a lot of time quietly trying to...

www.truenas.com

Introduction to ZFS

This is a short introduction to ZFS. It is really only intended to convey the bare minimum knowledge needed to start diving into ZFS and is in no way meant to cut Michael W. Lucas' and Allan Jude's book income. It is a bit of a spiritual...

www.truenas.com

ZFS Storage Pool Layout

This resource was originally created by user: @Davvo on the TrueNAS Community Forums Archive. This amazing document, created by iXsystems in February 2022 as a “White Paper”, cleanly explains how to qualify pool performance touching briefly on how ZFS stores data and presents the advantages...

www.truenas.com