Solved [ZFS & UFS] UFS or ZFS for the main drive on a NAS ?

Z

zeugme

Hi,

For a NAS, the question is UFS or ZFS for main drive ?
I'm thinking about 2 options, which one would you recommend ?

It is a recent hardware, Intel i3. 8Go.
Main drive is an old 1To classical HDD while the 4 other one are new 4To 'NAS' HDD of 2 different brands.
No SSD.

Option 1 full ZFS: main drive 100% ZFS and RAID Z1 with 4 drives with ZFS.
Option 2 mix: main drive 100% UFS and RAID Z1 with 4 drives with ZFS.
or any other better option I didn't think about ...

The other question underneath is : is it fine to boot on ZFS ?

Finally, after the filesystem, partition ...
Would you recommend a separate /boot partition on main drive in that NAS use case ?
Is there an impact on this question to choose ZFS or UFS ?
I was thinking to a simpler 2 partitions : / and swap but I'm very new to FreeBSD so I ask :)

Side note: not sure yet about RAID Z1 choice.
I'm willing to use RAIDZ1, but not sure for the other parameters :
* compression ? I plan not to activate compression except this could allow RAIDZ2 with the saved space (or 70% of it)
* I think 1 drive for parity will be enough and look like a traditional RAID5.
* I'm still reading for deduplication parameter. No idea right now.


Thanks !
 
Last edited:
zeugme said:
The other question underneath is : is it fine to boot on ZFS ?
Click to expand...
Yes.
zeugme said:
Would you recommend a separate /boot partition on main drive in that NAS use case ?
Click to expand...
No, never. Only in the case of a full disk encryption do you need it.
zeugme said:
compression ? I plan not to activate compression except this could allow RAIDZ2 with the saved space (or 70% of it)
Click to expand...
RAID-Z or RAID-Z2 has nothing to do with compression. RAID-Z2 on 4 disks is possible but terribly inefficient.
zeugme said:
I'm still reading for deduplication parameter. No idea right now.
Click to expand...
Don't. The rule of thumb is that you require at least 5GB of RAM per TB of storage to be able to enable this.
 
Thanks for your clear answers.
In fact, I don't need encryption and I didn't setup deduplication.

About Raid-Z : no confusion. It is just 2 différent questions.
I choose RAID-Z1 and lz4 compression, which is the default param.
The link betweek RAID-Zx and compression is that lz4 save space, so because if this saved space, maybe RAID-Z2 with compression would provide the same operational space than RAID-Z1 without compression.
So, at the price of CPU, is it possible to have more parity. Not sure if the ratio is that simple ...

Nevertheless, I choose RAID-Z1, so I'm afraid I'm stick to that choice now.

I had though one moment to mount the NAS from a FreeBSD "by hand" but I change my mind for FreeNAS.
Finally, FreeNAS do not ask for the main filesystem, I didn't had time to check, but it is probably ZFS.
 
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