At the moment I have my NAS setup as a Proxmox VM with a hardware RAID card handling 6 2TB disks. My VMs are running on NVMEs with the NAS VM handling the data storage with the RAIDed volume passed through to the VM direct in Proxmox. I am running it as a large ext4 partition. Mostly photos, personal docs and a few films. Only I really use it. My desktop and laptop mount it over NFS. I have restic backups running weekly to two external HDDs. It all works pretty well and has for years.
I am now getting ZFS curious. I know I’ll need to IT flash the HBA, or get another. I’m guessing it’s best to create the zpool in Proxmox and pass that through to the NAS VM? Or would it be better to pass the individual disks through to the VM and manage the zpool from there?
If you want multiple VMs to use the storage on the ZFS pool, better to create it in proxmox rather than passing raw disks thru to the VM.
ZFS is awesome, I wouldn’t use anything else now.
If I recall correctly it’s important to be running ECC memory right?
Otherwise corrupter bites/data can cause file system issues or loss.
You recall wrong. ECC is recommended for any server system but not necessary.
And if you dont have ECC zfs just might save your bacon when a more basic fs would allow corruption
I am more looking into BTRF for backup due to I run Linux and not BSD ZFS requires more RAM I only have one disk I want to benefit from snapshots, compression and deduplication.
I used btrfs once. Never again!
Why?
It stole all my data. It’s a bit of a clusterfuck of a file system, especially one so old. This article gives a good overview: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/examining-btrfs-linuxs-perpetually-half-finished-filesystem/ It managed to get into a state where it wouldn’t even let me mount it readonly. I even resorted to running commands of which the documentation just said “only run this if you know what you’re doing”, but actually gave no guidance to understand - it was basically a command for the developer to use and noone else. It ddn’t work anyway. Every other system that was using the same disks but with ext4 on their filesystems came back and I was able to fsck them and continue on. I think they’re all still running without issue 6 years later.
For such an old file system, it has a lot of braindead design choices and a huge amount of unreliability.
Dataloss is never fun. File systemet in general need a long time to iron out all the bugs. Hope it is in a better state today. I remember when ext4 was new and crashed in a laptop. Ubuntu was to early to adopt it, or I did not use LTS.
But as always, make sure to have a proper backup on a different physical location.
Found a Swede in this joint! Cheers.
You will find many more at feddit.nu
Yes I’m sure.
Not really searching for 'em though. :)
