Is ZFS worth it if i only have one physical disk ?
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My home installation of pfSense using ZFS had to suffer about 30 power outages till now. pfSense started smoothly again after each one.
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@IsaacFL well if you go through an in-place upgrade, eventually almost every file will get touched or close to
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I just installed a 2.4.5-p1 on a testmachine w zfs, and 1 mSATA 64GB disk.
The only ZFS parameter i changed (had to) , was :
Pool Type/Disks : - I had to select the mSATA as a stripe disk
Is that the correct choice for a 1 disk system ?None of them really makes sense (i think) , or can one really stripe on just one disk ?
/Bingo
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Does no one have any tips/recommendations for setting up ZFS on one HDD
Is my selection of the HDD as stripe enough , or is there any other "smart things" to do. on a 64GB mSATA disk setup
/Bingo
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@bingo600 said in Is ZFS worth it if i only have one physical disk ?:
Does no one have any tips/recommendations for setting up ZFS on one HDD
Hi,
We only install pfSense with ZFS!!!
Nothing special anyway ...There are 16GB versions installed and 32, 64 and more recently since smaller SSDs are not available 128GB
32GB is perfectly enough!It is a good idea to boost SWAP during installation if you have low RAM and that is it.
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I have 8G Ram & 64GB mSata in all my prod. units (i3-7100U)
So i'm not Ram constrained.Thank you for the reassurance.
/Bingo
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@bingo600 said in Is ZFS worth it if i only have one physical disk ?:
So i'm not Ram constrained.
In addition to 8GB of RAM, I used to upgrade the basic 2G SWAP to 4G, it's harder later and you don't know when and what you want to run
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I'll take it into advice ..
But once my FW starts to need to swap , i'd think hard about why i need that much Ram , and prob disable some of the "unneded" stuff that has to be active on the poor fella.
Waste Cycles on inspecting/forwarding packets , not on swapping.
/Bingo
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Don't know where that stuff from ZFS comes from, but we had installed several dozens of devices for multiple customers over the year and as soon as ZFS was available jumped ship and used it. Had the same stupid discussion with prejudices with our distri that argued that "ZFS is for storage and RAID and those boxes you install don't have that and so ZFS is bonkers". Had to slap him in the face with our statistics that clearly showed customers calling us for support for problems (when filesystem related) ALWAYS had UFS. Mostly power failure/shutdowns etc. as explained by @johnpoz
My own lab box at home was failing recently with 2.5-dev tests and I was like "Damn that's now the first time I have a filesystem bug/failure due to hard reset/reboots with ZWF..." - only to realize after rebooting and debugging that I did forget to install the device after installing the 2.5-snapshot with ZFS - so it was running UFS again - and promptly failed and wiped my config to 0 bytes after a kernel panic and hard reset. After reinstalling with ZFS I had multiple panics in 2.5-dev environments (IPv6 / WAN related mostly) and hard resets - not ONE disk/filesystem failures.
So those friends and hearsay people may well go with UFS if they like, I won't touch it with a five-foot-pole anymore :)
Cheers
\jens -
So knock on wood I have not had any issues, well one on a old 2440 that had lost power.. But normally all the pfsense I have are on good ups, and normally stable power anyway.
But I have planned on my own 4860 to move to zfs when 2.5 comes out and take the time to upgrade to that.. Just going bring it up on zfs then.
