SOLVED What filesystems does latest FreeNAS support?

[djpinoy]

I'm coming from a much older installation and I understand that the latest versions of FreeNAS no longer support UFS... but do these latest versions of FreeNAS support any other filesystems besides ZFS? (ext3/4? FAT?) By "support", I mean mount and read/write.

One of the drives used in my NAS is earmarked for "scratch" space - stuff that is nice to have, but doesn't necessarily need all the protection of ZFS. Would be great if I could mount that as some kind of non-ZFS filesystem.

I'm still looking for the answer and reading through docs so if anyone can point me in the right direction, that would be helpful.

Thanks!

 

[danb35]

ZFS is it. You can import data from a number of others, but the only filesystem with full r/w support is ZFS.

 

[djpinoy]

Thanks @danb35 - that answers my question.

Curious about the reason for dropping support - Are the developers keen on focusing only on ZFS? I guess if your target customers are interested only in reliability, there's no need to support something that would be less reliable (even if it would be a "nice-to-have" for hobbyists running smaller servers and the like)?

 

[Stux]

You can have ZFS without redundancy. You get the benefit of integrity checking so you know when your scratch drive is corrupting data, and which data.

Just set the scratch up as a single drive pool.

 

[gpsguy]

Back in the days when UFS was supported by the developers (8.0 - 9.2.1.9), it was hardly used (other than the boot device) and community support for UFS was nearly non-existent.

 

[danb35]

Curious about the reason for dropping support

The only other option was ever UFS, and as @gpsguy notes, that was rarely used and minimally (at best) supported. RAID options were minimal, and of course it doesn't have any of the other features of ZFS.

 

[djpinoy]

You can have ZFS without redundancy. You get the benefit of integrity checking so you know when your scratch drive is corrupting data, and which data.

Just set the scratch up as a single drive pool.

Duh -I should've thought of that. I have been using this ZFS calculator to figure out my next pool config and didn't think of "no redundancy" for the scratch drive... tho I'm curious now much overhead ZFS will still cost me (knowing that it should be non-zero).

Thanks all!

 

[danb35]

I'm curious now much overhead ZFS will still cost me (knowing that it should be non-zero)

About 3%, IIRC, in addition to the 2 GB that FreeNAS reserves by default for swap space on each disk.