XFS vs ZFS vs EXT4 vs BTRFS for a NAS, your thoughts and why?

[ANNIHILATOR284]

which of these file systems would you prefer over others for a 10+ TB multi driver NAS? your thoughts and reasons below!

[themctipers]

ZFS because redundancy, something something no corruption, something something good performance, and because its designed for NAS (or something like that)

 

i wouldn't put EXT4 because none of what i said above, and BTRFS isn't as stable as ZFS

[ANNIHILATOR284]

1 minute ago, themctipers said:

ZFS because redundancy, something something no corruption, something something good performance, and because its designed for NAS (or something like that)

 

i wouldn't put EXT4 because none of what i said above, and BTRFS isn't as stable as ZFS

okay! so what is btrfs was as stable as zfs, what then? and maybe a bit more in detail if possible. cheers!

[themctipers]

Just now, ANNIHILATOR284 said:

okay! so what is btrfs was as stable as zfs, what then? and maybe a bit more in detail if possible. cheers!

i honestly have no idea, all i know is that i did try to run a NAS on my secondary PC and i couldn't get ZFS to work, so i tried BTRFS and I couldn't get it to work (stupidity on my part) and so that was the end of my NAS fun (because fuck it) 

don't expect details from me wikipedia is better at that

 

basically BTRFS and REFS are competitors to ZFS, FreeNAS uses it and thats why I used it. 

[ANNIHILATOR284]

1 minute ago, themctipers said:

i honestly have no idea, all i know is that i did try to run a NAS on my secondary PC and i couldn't get ZFS to work, so i tried BTRFS and I couldn't get it to work (stupidity on my part) and so that was the end of my NAS fun (because fuck it) 

don't expect details from me wikipedia is better at that

 

basically BTRFS and REFS are competitors to ZFS, FreeNAS uses it and thats why I used it. 

aah ok.

[Jarsky]

Out of those unix file systems, if I could afford the upfront cost of all my drives and didn't really plan to expand it - then i'd go for ZFS on BSD. 

It has excellent protection, a robust filesystem that protects against bitrot, and lots of features like the levels of cache. 

 

If i wanted flexibility to grow the array then i'd go EXT4 with MDADM in Linux due to its maturity and robustness. Theres a lot of support for it as well. 

 

XFS is a mature file system as well, but I don't like the way its implemented in unRAID - especially for multi-honed use. 

 

BTRFS is basically the Linux version of ZFS (rather than just ZFS ported to Linux), but it still needs work around RAID. 

[ANNIHILATOR284]

2 minutes ago, Jarsky said:

Out of those unix file systems, if I could afford the upfront cost of all my drives and didn't really plan to expand it - then i'd go for ZFS on BSD. 

It has excellent protection, a robust filesystem that protects against bitrot, and lots of features like the levels of cache. 

 

If i wanted flexibility to grow the array then i'd go EXT4 with MDADM in Linux due to its maturity and robustness. Theres a lot of support for it as well. 

 

XFS is a mature file system as well, but I don't like the way its implemented in unRAID - especially for multi-honed use. 

 

BTRFS is basically the Linux version of ZFS (rather than just ZFS ported to Linux), but it still needs work around RAID. 

so how would you rate linus's use of unraid and btrfs for his servers and the 2 drive parity he runs on them? and if you would change it then why?

[Jarsky]

17 minutes ago, ANNIHILATOR284 said:

so how would you rate linus's use of unraid and btrfs for his servers and the 2 drive parity he runs on them? and if you would change it then why?

 

unRAID uses XFS, only the cache drives used for CoW are currently using BTRFS.

I'm not a fan of the way unRAID handles raid like a span, theres a lot of advantages to distributing across multiple spindles as far as performance.

I'm also not a fan of their drive limitations with licensing. If i was going to go for a solution like this, i'd rather use FlexRAID. (Currently I use hardware RAID for my primary NAS storage)

 

 

[ANNIHILATOR284]

1 minute ago, Jarsky said:

 

unRAID uses XFS, only the cache drives used for CoW are currently using BTRFS.

I'm not a fan of the way unRAID handles raid like a span, theres a lot of advantages to distributing across multiple spindles as far as performance.

I'm also not a fan of their drive limitations with licensing. If i was going to go for a solution like this, i'd rather use FlexRAID. (Currently I use hardware RAID for my primary NAS storage)

 

 

sounds good, i've been using FreeNAS for over a yer and recently shifted to unRAID as freenas had become absolutely unstable and a pain in the butt. and i've quiet likes unraid's approach to plug in and forget, plug in 20 drives 2 parity and you're good to go. and regarding the drive limit, i hardy think i'm ever gonna cross the 6 drive limit let. 

 

got a link to your NAS setup i can look at and learn from?

[Jarsky]

4 minutes ago, ANNIHILATOR284 said:

got a link to your NAS setup i can look at and learn from?

 

Details are in my signature but heres a link. It's now up to a 12 disk RAID6

 

 

[Mikensan]

I believe redhat dropped btrfs which is a kick in the balls, having a large player like that bundle it would'vet helped it gain more traction. ZFS has grown pretty fast lately simply because of FreeNAS/TrueNAS.

 

EXT4 is just a file system, as NTFS is - it doesn't really do anything for a NAS and would require either hardware or software to add some flavor. So it has no barring.

 

I don't know anything about XFS (I thought unRaid was entirely btrfs before this thread)

 

ZFS is pretty reliable and very mature. It's not the fastest but not exactly a slouch. It's built for protecting your data, but since the performance hit for that protection isn't really that bad, lot of us use it for more than just warm/cold storage.

 

I've used FreeNAS for... 3 years now I think. Since 9.6 maybe? The only issue I've ever had (consistently) is AD integration. Now that I have a second FreeNAS box that does not need AD - I used it to test AD on updates. Other than a burnt out cyberjock (I say that because he seems pretty grumpy answering the same questions 100x times, I would be too) the FreeNAS community is pretty lively and full of support. Also since your boot disk uses snapshots rolling back after a bad update is cake.

 

Linux distros would bundle ZFS if it weren't for the more strict licensing (much more complicated I'm told) of ZFS. You can install it manually (hence the port) but bundlinging it somehow offends the license gods. I think linux + zfs would be badass given the immense flexibility and support for linux. Install docker and KVM, and you have one hell of a solution.

[leadeater]

For a small NAS where small addition of single drives is wanted to expand it BTRFS would be my pick, ZFS simply is not as flexible as BTRFS in that regard and not everyone is going to be able to add disks to a ZFS pool in groups of 4 or 8 etc. Then the other issue is that if you add vdevs to a pool they are striped so if a vdev dies the pool dies. 

[jonnygrove]

On 8/18/2017 at 12:28 PM, ANNIHILATOR284 said:

so how would you rate linus's use of unraid and btrfs for his servers and the 2 drive parity he runs on them? and if you would change it then why?

I don't think Linus really uses unraid for his servers, other than his offsite backup server. From what I've gathered, he's either running a hardware raid array (in terms of the all SSD array), hybrid hardware+software array (I believe the whonnock server - not sure if he still uses that), or a ZFS array. Both the Vault and Petabyte project run ZFS arrays. In terms of petabyte project, he also has the storinators clustered into a GlusterFS storage pool (on CentOS he mentions in the video, FreeNas on the vault). Linus has really only fully showcased unRaid in the Multi-Gamer "One CPU" videos - and that's really for the virtualization features of unRaid, not so much the storage aspect.

 

In my opinion, it all depends on what the NAS purpose and user-base will be. If you're going for an office/enterprise-like environment (like LMG), you'll want to put the effort into getting ZFS up and running for the extra reliability+performance benefits.

 

If you're setting up a simple home-NAS that you'll access every so often - and only has maybe 3-5 users accessing it max, ever - then you're probably better off using a solution like unRaid that's easy to setup and manage, gives you some level of device protection with 1-2 parity disks, and adds on some extra features like docker containers and vms.

[LAwLz]

On 8/18/2017 at 6:25 PM, Jarsky said:

BTRFS is basically the Linux version of ZFS (rather than just ZFS ported to Linux), but it still needs work around RAID. 

To expand on this point, RAID56 in Btrfs needs work. However, that is just the built in RAID function in Btrfs.

There is no problem using for example mdadm to RAID Brtfs drives though.