DO I need ZFS in my home server?

Lumikor · April 10, 2019

My new server is as followed: i7 8700 + 32 Gb of ram + 1TB NVME boot device + 1 256GB SSD (will like it to cache, or throw it away, I still don't know) + few HDDs (right now 4 with mixed capacities, will upgrade all to 8TB soon™)

The server is for my website (Wordpress based), Plex, iTunes, TimeMachine, and some general file storage.

I don't do anything "Hardcore" on it, I don't edit videos off of it, I complete a project locally and copy it for storage. My iTunes library is huge, but it these aren't huge files and my Plex movies and shows are normal 1080p, not even 4k yet.

Right now everything is on RAID5, works, no issues.

But a friend told me to switch to ZFS to get more power out of it, saying it's faster and more secure. But I know nothing about it beside it's the main feature of of FreeNAS and enterprise class work loads. Is it really that good? Should I use it for my needs? Will it really make my server much better for the long term?

Eniqmatic · April 10, 2019

It is good...but no I wouldn't recommend it for your needs, since you don't seem familiar with it (no offence intended) and given its complexity, I wouldn't recommend it. Also throwing blanket statements around like "its faster and more secure" isn't helpful from your friend, can guarantee that he has not done a back to back comparison of both setups with your specific hardware.

If you are happy with the performance currently, why change? Unless there is something else that you want it for.

Windows7ge · April 10, 2019

I've been working with FreeNAS(ZFS) for the past 4 years now. It is not a performance oriented file system. It's designed with data integrity as its main feature. BTRFS or ReFS would be better for raw speed. On a 1Gbit network ZFS won't be any faster than any other file system and on 10Gbit things can get complicated to configure. The OS overall is not super user friendly and has a learning curve (although it should be mentioned that ZFS is not limited to the FreeNAS OS). If you can already max your link to your current box and if you aren't looking to get more advanced functionality like snapshots, replication, datasets, or access to different share protocols like NFS, iSCSI, or MacOS then it isn't worth it.

And I have to agree with Eniqmatic that your friend probably hasn't done any serious research and is just saying its faster because he likes it and it worked for him.

dalekphalm · April 10, 2019

2 hours ago, Lumikor said:

But a friend told me to switch to ZFS to get more power out of it, saying it's faster and more secure.

"faster and more secure"? What?

Your friend doesn't know what they are talking about.

1. Speed: ZFS (if talking Parity based arrays, like RAIDZ1 and RAIDZ2) isn't slow, per se, but it's not fast. You can get good performance out of it by designing an optimal array from the beginning, adding in cache drives, etc, but there's an upper limit unless you go entirely SSD.

2. "Secure": This honestly makes zero sense. ZFS is no more secure than any other filesystem that supports encryption. You can encrypt a Windows or Linux volume. You can get RAID Cards that have hardware encryption. These things are not unique to ZFS.

In your specific case, how are you creating the RAID5 array? Using what hardware or software?