File Storage - How do you do it - suggestions for my next solution?

General Discussions
21

I’m a little confused by your post. One on hand you’re saying you don’t need to use ECC to run FreeNAS but on the other hand you tout all the file integrity features of ZFS. You can’t have it both ways.

Hopefully this clears it up: With ECC memory, ZFS provides greater integrity guarantees that other storage systems. Without ECC, the guarantees degrade to no worse that the said other systems. My touting of the integrity features are when you elect to use ECC memory in order to get those guarantees.

I can’t think of a single benefit ZFS has over NSA’s for media storage without ECC.

There’s a long list of filesystem level features which are available in ZFS (or shared with very few other filesystems). Only the greater integrity guarantees are reliant on ECC memory; the filesystem features are available both with and without ECC. Also, several years ago I was running ZFS on a non-ECC machine and it survived an odd drive failure that other systems at the time would not have survived and many still wouldn’t today. This is one of the reasons why integrity is so important to me today.

I could go on, but this thread would be at risk of devolving into a ZFS vs NSA debate so I’ll just leave it with the above.

22

@gbooker02 These filesystem level features that you speak of that helped prevent data loss, could you elaborate on them? I’m genuinely curious so if you want to PM me instead of go on here that’s cool. I’m just trying to understand if these features you speak of only provide an advantage over other striped arrays where losing disks beyond parity means total data loss. Since this isn’t an issue with NSA’s I’m trying to wrap my head around where these ZFS-only advantages lie.

23

its just a file system that is designed to help prevent dataloss, like ntfs but much better if implemented properly.

I would only venture into this if you run your own custom built hardware and OS and have an interest in fiddling with technology.

If you just want a system that runs out of the box with little or no messing around then any of the other file system will be fine, ext4 is fine as is XFS or even NTFS if you use windows.

The wikipedia article is quite thorough - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS