ZFS Features VS Home Media Purposes

[Bo Doe]

I've been doing a little light reading on ZFS, and the abilities of ZFS are pretty instense. In regards to data integrity, confidentiality, and availability (CIA), ZFS has those bases covered. This list may not be all-inclusive or elaborate, but here's the features of ZFS (according to my understanding):
- protection against data corruption
- support for high storage capacity
- data compression
- integrated filesystem/volume management
- snapshot
- copy-on-write
- continuous integry checking
- automatic repair
- RAID-Z

Relative to a home media server, many of these features are unnecessary. For example, continuous integrity checking and copy-on-write for a few TB of movies is a bit overkill. These features are much more relevant in an enterprise environment where data must meet CIA standards.

I've seen plenty of posts regarding builds for a home media/data server. If you look at these users' situation objectively, then the question isn't really "How can I build a FreeNAS for this purpose?", but instead "Is FreeNAS the appropriate build for this purpose?" Objectively speaking, I think the answer to that question would be "no." A solution that is much more likely to fit their budget while fullfilling their needs would probably be a simple pre-built NAS from Amazon that only requires a HDD and setting some permissions, or maybe an Amazon Fire stick (depending on how basic you want to get).

Perhaps I'm a bit off on my thinking. Eh?

 

[nightshade00013]

Well the thing I think about with ZFS is twofold, one is spanning multiple drives with hardware independence. If one of the hardware NAS appliances dies will you be able to pull your drives out and access your data easily or will you have to hunt for an identical product with the same firmware level. As far as the data corruption part on movies, figuring that a movie takes an hour per to rip and encode 2 TB is about 800 hours of encoding. If you want to do it all over again due to data corruption that is fine. But sitting there with the wife having a birthday party for the 5 year old when all the kids wanting to watch their favorite barney video and saying sorry kids it's broke and the disc is packed away doesn't sound fun to me. And I am SURE that the wife wanting to sit down to watch some chick flick where here favorite heartthrob actor is going to save the day while drinking a glass of wine only to have data corruption ruin her night will not win you any brownie points either.

As far as the other software features I think they are all VERY relevant if you use it to store personal pictures. Would you take something that can not be replaced and dangle it over the a industrial shredder with a string or would you prefer to build a steel platform and set it on that over the same shredder?

Plus the NAS appliances don't generally have the power to run things like Plex and transcode. If you want to expand you either have to pony up for the biggest one they have or buy a second. FreeNAS will run on a lot of hardware and even though it may use a bit more power older server grade hardware is still relevant to do so. Want to add more storage add a SAS controller or expander.

The beauty of storage is that you can do it any number of ways that you like. But I have seen a lot more people coming off of the NAS appliances to FreeNAS compared to people saying they can't stand FreeNAS and are just going to buy a Drobo. I used to run my NAS off of Windows XP and had a drive fail which really made me look toward something better. After having to RMA a drive just a few months ago and the only downtime being the time it took to pull it out of the server and then replace it when the drive came back I am more than happy with it and have sent one with my stepdaughter and my father has one as well.

 

[Zredwire]

If you don't need much storage or performance than I agree, a small prebuilt NAS from Qnap or something would probably be fine. Once you start talking more than two had drives then most of the time Freenas will be less expensive than a prebuilt. I used to have a Qnap TS-220 at home with two 3TB had drives in a mirror. For sequential reads it would max a Gigabit connection. For sequential writes it would do about 500Mb/s. Not bad for its little size. I got where I needed more space and wanted to add drives. When I saw the prices for prebuilt NAS devices with 4 or more drives I started to look elsewhere. I found out about Freenas and decided to give it a try on an old machine. I first put the two hard drives in that had been in the QNAP. Reads speed was the same, but now write speed (sequential) had doubled and it could also max out a Gigabit connection. Once I saw what all Freenas could do I ended up building one that did a lot more than my old QNAP. But to stay on subject, you would be hard pressed to find a decent 4 bay prebuilt NAS for $300 or less. You could get an HPE ML10 Gen9 and add 4GB ram (for a total of 8GB) for between $260 and $310 total price. Now you have a nice NASs that can hold 6 hard drives right off the bat and 8 hard drives with two $7.00 adapters. Very hard to beat that price and you get to have Freenas (which is superior to most consumer prebuilt NAS boxes I believe). Also you are much better poised for growth with the $310 Freenas build. So my thinking is if you only need two hard drives then go with prebuilt NAS from Amazon. If you need more drives than I would take a serious look at Freenas.

 

[Chris Moore]

Relative to a home media server, many of these features are unnecessary. For example, continuous integrity checking and copy-on-write for a few TB of movies is a bit overkill. These features are much more relevant in an enterprise environment where data must meet CIA standards.

Not true at all. The advantage of the checksum system that ZFS uses protects data that is cold as much as any other data. There is such a thing as bit-rot, where data becomes corrupted even sitting idle on a disk that is not running due (among other things) to actual rust or the equivalent.
The periodic scrubs and the checksum data that ZFS records allows the file system to know if the video or photo that you stored ten years ago of your child taking their first step or having their first birthday party, it allows you to know if it is damaged and repair it so you can still watch that video that you have not looked at in two years. ZFS is for anyone that has data they care about.

Perhaps I'm a bit off on my thinking. Eh?

If all you want to do is watch pre-recorded media, go with a fire stick. FreeNAS is for storing data that is important or that you want to be able to access 10 or 20 or 100 years from now.

 

[spotcatbug]

I've seen plenty of posts regarding builds for a home media/data server. If you look at these users' situation objectively, then the question isn't really "How can I build a FreeNAS for this purpose?", but instead "Is FreeNAS the appropriate build for this purpose?" Objectively speaking, I think the answer to that question would be "no."

(Emphasis on "data" added by me.)

I think what you say holds true for a home media server; however, you've lumped "data" in there as well. To me "data" means, "the good stuff that you need to keep well-protected." PC backups, family photos. Stuff like that.

I think we all agree that FreeNAS is well-suited for a home data server. OK, but not media, surely? Well, if you already want/require a data server, isn't it better/easier/(cheaper?) to maintain a single system for both data and media?

This is how I came to use FreeNAS for my home media/data server. I needed network attached storage for both data and media, but I only wanted to deal with and maintain a single NAS. As a side-effect, now my media is being treated extra nicely.

 

[Chris Moore]

I think (and I may be wrong) but it is what I believe, most people that use those ultra cheap prebuilt systems will ultimately be disappointed by them. I had one of the WD dual drive NAS systems and not only was it slow, I had a disk failure that it didn't tell me about and it caused me all sorts of suffering. I have been looking for a good solution for home data storage for almost as long as I have been working in IT. I had a Dell PowereEdge 4300 server (8 SCSI drives) and disk shelf with 14 more drives all connected to a quad channel hardware RAID controller, in my house. If you are serious about keeping your data, the data that really matters, you don't pickup your storage system from Best Buy.
Not disparaging anyone that bought drives on sale, but you didn't buy the server there.
It really is a whole other thing when you start to assign a value to data.

 

[Bo Doe]

I completely agree with all the points you guys have made. I guess the main point I was getting at is I think FreeNAS is not the most appropriate solution for all scenarios, and often we can be more focused on building a FreeNAS that we believe the customer "should" build instead of building a solution around their needs. Some of the most important questions regarding the situation, user, and data should probably be asked first before asking the budget and creating a hardware list: the importance of the data, data backup plan (off-site backups, manual DVD backups, etc.), impact of downtime, knowledge of the user, user's dedication to learning FreeNAS, amount of time the user can invest in the setup and maintenance. The answers to these questions would easily rule out, for example, a FireStick if the user wanted a server to house their media and important financial records.

I think I have one idea, although I'm pretty sure I'll get flamed for it... Anywho, it's common knowledge that building a NAS requires hardware to follow certain guidelines due to it's use of ZFS (as well as other factors). If there was magically a FreeNAS version that was nonZFS, then that would alleviate many of the guidelines for hardware. Would it not? This would eliminate many features of FreeNAS, however it would be a perfect solution for many of those that ask how to build a FreeNAS from an old AMD system (just as an example; there's oodles of posts with requests along this line). But then, would it be equally as safe to have a ZFS FreeNAS that just doesn't conform to hardware suggestions?

I'm just curious, mainly. I come across these posts, and I don't know if I'm the only one that has thought about these things, or if I'm off my rocker (very strong possibility though).

 

[gpsguy]

Just use FreeNAS 9.219 or something earlier. Earlier versions supported UFS.

If there was magically a FreeNAS version that was nonZFS, then that would alleviate many of the guidelines for hardware.

 

[Chris Moore]

If you go back to an old enough version of FreeNAS, you can even get along with only 4GB of RAM. Yes, you give up features and your data is a greater risk, but you can do it. You could also just use a linux distro, use mdadm to create a software RAID, make a samba share and you are in business. There are many ways to get a storage server on your network, even using free options. Nothing says you need to use FreeNAS.
The reason to use FreeNAS are ZFS and the many features. If you don't use the features and you don't want ZFS, you can easily use any of dozens of other solutions to get a group of disks shared to the network.
I am not sure what your point is. If you don't like FreeNAS, what are you doing here?

PS.

If there was magically a FreeNAS version that was nonZFS, then that would alleviate many of the guidelines for hardware. Would it not?

Some of the guidelines are more about reliability and are not directly connected to ZFS. They are geared to help new users avoid the tears associated with losing their data after configuring their storage in a way that is not reliable.

 

[Arwen]

Agreed with most of the responses.

Mostly I use FreeNAS and ZFS because I just don't want to worry about my important data. In reality, I could keep 10 copies of my important data, (less than 50GB per copy), which would be much cheaper than a file server. But, without ZFS, I would have to manually compare the copies to make sure I did not have any bad copies.

My ideal storage server would have all of ZFS' features, but allow redundancy at the dataset level. So RAID-Z1 for my media, RAID-Z2 for backups, like my laptop, plus misc. data. And last, RAID-Z3 for my important data.
You can sort of get this using "copies=2", or 3. But ZFS was not designed for RAID-Z1 and loosing 3 disks.