While much of the technical detail is beyond my "kenn" as my first LOL of the day, thanks Adam with sincere appreciation of matters you know that I do not "It is worth noting that if you run your filesystems VERY full (>90%) you should not choose ZFS – it really, really, really likes to have a lot of room to rearrange things, even though it basically never does any rearranging."
Eduard
On 2023-12-16 23:22, Adam Thompson wrote:
As a happy user of FreeNAS (and now TrueNAS) for many years, I definitely recommend it.
However - it is NOT just another UNIX system with ZFS and Samba, it’s a self-contained appliance that happens to be based on FreeBSD and ZFS. There’s limited ability to get under the hood, which can be frustrating to some people, but at the same time it’s fascinating to see how iX took a commodity OS and filesystem and turned it into a commercial-grade appliance.
IIRC, it took until 2019 for x86-architecture systems to beat the Sun E450 running ZFS (IIRC 4x450MHz UltraSPARC, 3GB RAM, and I think 14 x 9GB 7200rpm UltraSCSI disks) that I had heating my living room circa 2004. Part of that was the system architecture (both PCI-based, but VERY different!), the memory architecture, the I/O architecture, and the OS, but the filesystem definitely played a part in it, too.
The MUUG server runs ZFS for this reason, and it does the job quite well. (No filesystem handles running out of space well; that wasn’t ZFS’s fault anyway.) It is worth noting that if you run your filesystems VERY full (>90%) you should not choose ZFS – it really, really, really likes to have a lot of room to rearrange things, even though it basically never does any rearranging.
-Adam