Hardware raid or ZFS?

[Underi]

I have a home server currently running Ubuntu 18.04 with an old noisy hitachi HDD. I just bought a couple of 2TB WD Blues and am going to go RAID1 and Proxmox.

 

I got a raid controller from a friend of mine which I could use but it’s quite low-end, has only two sata ports and IDE. Thought that ZFS might be a better idea considering future storage upgrades? Proxmox seems to claim that setting up ZFS is quite easy and it might be a more reliable option overall. 

Will performance be severely affected with ZFS? I’m running a Xeon X3460 with 8GB RAM so quite old and quite slow. Is hardware raid inherently better in a situation like this? 
 

I’ll try to work out the name of my raid controller asap, at work when posting.

[leadeater]

ZFS or mdadm will work for you, mdadm may actually be better for this smaller use case.

[Windows7ge]

Given you're not using parity RAID the performance impact will be negligible. If anything RAID1 will put you in a situation where by adding another RAID1 vdev to the pool down the road will increase not only your reads/writes but your IOPS as well which is desirable on a hypervisor.

 

Given this I would go ahead with a ZFS mirror. (RAID1)

 

And don't use the RAID controller as a means for more ports unless it supports JBOD or IT mode. Buy an HBA.

[Aragorn-]

ZFS mirror would be my choice.

 

Dont worry about old/slow hardware, its a home fileserver, you dont need a rocketship.

[Underi]

On 3/25/2021 at 8:45 AM, leadeater said:

ZFS or mdadm will work for you, mdadm may actually be better for this smaller use case.

How will mdadm compare to zfs? What makes you think it’s better here?

 

On 3/25/2021 at 3:19 PM, Windows7ge said:

Given this I would go ahead with a ZFS mirror. (RAID1)

 

On 3/26/2021 at 12:58 PM, Aragorn- said:

ZFS mirror would be my choice.

 

Dont worry about old/slow hardware, its a home fileserver, you dont need a rocketship.

What do you think about mdadm as an alternative?

[leadeater]

Just now, Underi said:

How will mdadm compare to zfs? What makes you think it’s better here?

ZFS performance is much closer attributed to the amount of RAM in the system and cache hit ratio, it's a system designed for larger scale and offers excellent performance and features but it doesn't scale down too well. That said it should be fine when sticking to RAID 1 and the benefit of using ZFS is later on you can add another RAID 1 disk set to the pool and expand the total usable capacity, you won't get that with mdadm.

 

The main benefit to mdadm is it's extremely simple and little to go wrong. There honestly isn't much in it as you won't likely use any of the other features of ZFS so if you think you'll want to add more disks to the system later on then use ZFS if not flip a coin.

[Underi]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

ZFS performance is much closer attributed to the amount of RAM in the system and cache hit ratio, it's a system designed for larger scale and offers excellent performance and features but it doesn't scale down too well. That said it should be fine when sticking to RAID 1 and the benefit of using ZFS is later on you can add another RAID 1 disk set to the pool and expand the total usable capacity, you won't get that with mdadm.

 

The main benefit to mdadm is it's extremely simple and little to go wrong. There honestly isn't much in it as you won't likely use any of the other features of ZFS so if you think you'll want to add more disks to the system later on then use ZFS if not flip a coin.

Thanks a lot for the explanation. I’ll be going with ZFS since I’ll likely be adding more drives to the system as it fills up.

[Windows7ge]

5 hours ago, Underi said:

What do you think about mdadm as an alternative?

Unfortunately I don't have much experience with mdadm but I have ram ZFS on something as slow as a Atom C2750 and the performance was fine even with parity.