The eternal question about ZFS Vs UFS, still not clear some stuff!

[Lucas Rey]

Dear community,
yes, I already know, it's a redundant question, and I'd already read tons of posts about this argument, but it still not clear, for my personal needs, if ZFS is better then UFS.

I'm going to build a NAS with the following disk configs:
4 x 1Tb RAIDZ1
or
2 x 3Tb MIRROR
I still need to decide the config, but it's not important for now.

Assuming for instance I don't use for now the ZFS features (like dataset, snapshot, etc....), regarding performance, which is better (read/write throughput) from UFS and ZFS using the same disk configuration? And in general, are there real pros or cons using ZFS instead of UFS? Like stability, better dataloss/recovery, etc....

Many thanks!
Lucas

 

[Lucas Rey]

In the mean time, I performed some read/write measurements on test environment (VMWare).

Definitely there is no so much differences between MIRROR UFS and MIRROR ZFS. Maybe ZFS is just a little bit quick in some tests.
RAIDZ2 show what we already known, more ram = more performance, but surprisingly RAIDZ2 with 8 Gb ram seem the configuration with better (or at list the most balaced) read/write performance. Well, I don't activate any features on ZFS.

I would like to know your experience, expecially on real environment.

 

[Lucas Rey]

no one interested?

 

[cyberjock]

Not really. The reason its an eternal question is that there is no definitive answer. There are advantages and disadvantages to each depending on what you plan to use it for, the hardware you plan to run it on, etc.

Put simply, the best you can do is do your own homework and make your own decision. It's not like Windows where if you want a boot drive that is bigger than 128GB you have to switch to NTFS from FAT32. There's not much choice there. But the reasons why you might want(or not want) a particular file system are personal in nature and can only be determined by yourself based on the hardware and software you plan to use.

Your question is not novel, it's asked every so often by someone, and the answer is always the same. You have to pick it for yourself.