ZFS opinions for media server and data storage?

[Jake]

What is your opinion of ZFS when used for a home media center with large video files and small data files?

From my understanding FreeNAS uses ZFS, and it will stripe the data across all the drives in a volume/pool. This means small data files will spin-up all the hard drives.

It is also my understanding striping the drives means you can't pull drives out of the pool and open the files on another system.

It is also my understanding you can't add new drives to the pool. This would be a typical scenario of adding more storage space in the future.

 

[Mirfster]

1. Works great for me
2. Yes, but that would be the same for any Raid where data is striped. There are ways to negate it a bit, L2ARC or separate Pool/Volumes
3. Correct, but you could easily just install FreeNAS or even FreeBSD..
4. You can add additional vDev(s) which consists of drive(s). Or you can simply replace the existing drives with larger ones and the vDev will auto-expand. *** Note all of the drives in the vDev would need to be replaced with larger ones before that will occur.

 

[pirateghost]

http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/zfsprimer.html#zfs-primer

Time to start reading. ;)

You have a few misconceptions in your current assessment

 

[Stux]

http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/zfsprimer.html#zfs-primer

Time to start reading. ;)

You have a few misconceptions in your current assessment

I don't know, I think he's pretty spot on, except you can add additional drives, but they essentially need to be an additional raid set (i.e. a vdev)

 

[Stux]

http://doc.freenas.org/9.10/zfsprimer.html#zfs-primer

Time to start reading. ;)

You have a few misconceptions in your current assessment

I don't know, I think he's pretty spot on, except you can add additional drives, but they essentially need to be an additional raid set (i.e. a vdev)

 

[Mirfster]

You have a few misconceptions in your current assessment

Who? Me?... C'mon teach tell me it ain't so...

 

[depasseg]

Who? Me?... C'mon teach tell me it ain't so...

I think he was referring to the OP.

A Pool is made up of vdevs. Vdevs can be made of 1 or more disks (and this is where the RAID configuration is made). Data is striped across the vdevs. Vdevs (containing 1 or more new drives) can be added to a pool. Drives cannot be added to vdevs to increase capacity (only to add a mirror). The loss of any vdev will cause the destruction of the pool.

 

[danb35]

Drives cannot be added to vdevs.

...with the exception of turning a single-drive vdev into a mirror, or an n-way mirror into an n+1-way mirror. Neither of these can be done through the GUI (still), but they can certainly be done from the CLI.

 

[Mirfster]

...with the exception of turning a single-drive vdev into a mirror, or an n-way mirror into an n+1-way mirror. Neither of these can be done through the GUI (still), but they can certainly be done from the CLI.

Oh yeah, there is that... Good point..

 

[depasseg]

...with the exception of turning a single-drive vdev into a mirror, or an n-way mirror into an n+1-way mirror. Neither of these can be done through the GUI (still), but they can certainly be done from the CLI.

good point! I edited my post to reflect that. Thx!