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Freenas - ZFS - is it reliable?

post #1 of 5
3/12/12 at 3:06am
Thread Starter 
Ive just bought an HP Proliant home server to replace the box of bits I slapped together last year.

Ive been running WHS, but have had a few minor irritations with it.

I am thinking of going the Freenas route. This would be RAID-Z over two 2TB drives, with a third, external device, as backup.

So here's my concern:

I have had a stab at Ffreenas (without redundancy) and it ate my data. ZFS data recovery is a nightmare (I work as a PC tech full time, and its diabolical compared to NTFS, which I can do relatively easily if something did go wrong).

So Im a bit wary.

SO before putting my head on the block again... I wanted to ask the community:

What has your experience been like with ZFS/Freenas?

Has it worked reliably for you?
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post #2 of 5
3/12/12 at 6:28am
I can't speak for FreeNAS specifically, but ZFS on FreeBSD is quite reliable. There are a bunch of very smart people, in the FreeBSD community, working on it right now. I don't use it at home but I'm involved with commercial products that do use it, at my day job. If I had to choose between traditional software RAID, hardware RAID or ZFS, I'd pick ZFS any day.

Now, ZFS might not be the best solution for some. While it has many advantages over traditional RAID and other filesystems, you still have many of the same negatives that come with using traditional RAID. For example, you pretty much need to always use the same size drives. You also cannot extend the size of a RAIDZ (you can grow it by replacing the drives and you can expand a pool by adding another RAIDZ but you can't add drives to an existing RAIDZ). Those are some reasons why you see a lot of people using unraid and whatnot around here.

Quote:


(without redundancy) and it ate my data

Did a drive fail on you or did ZFS really cause you to loose data? If it was the former, then you can't blame it. After all, you said it yourself... 'without redundancy' and based on your next sentence, it also sounds like 'without backup'.

Quote:
Originally Posted by etheesdad View Post

ZFS data recovery is a nightmare

It's quite easy. You just restore your data from your backup RAID(Z) is not backup. Trying to recover data from a failed array is going about it the wrong way if you ask me.

Quote:


This would be RAID-Z over two 2TB drives

A mirror. RAID-Z requires 3 devices.
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post #3 of 5
3/12/12 at 1:25pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by mslide View Post

I can't speak for FreeNAS specifically, but ZFS on FreeBSD is quite reliable. There are a bunch of very smart people, in the FreeBSD community, working on it right now. I don't use it at home but I'm involved with commercial products that do use it, at my day job. If I had to choose between traditional software RAID, hardware RAID or ZFS, I'd pick ZFS any day.

Now, ZFS might not be the best solution for some. While it has many advantages over traditional RAID and other filesystems, you still have many of the same negatives that come with using traditional RAID. For example, you pretty much need to always use the same size drives. You also cannot extend the size of a RAIDZ (you can grow it by replacing the drives and you can expand a pool by adding another RAIDZ but you can't add drives to an existing RAIDZ). Those are some reasons why you see a lot of people using unraid and whatnot around here.



1. Did a drive fail on you or did ZFS really cause you to loose data? If it was the former, then you can't blame it. After all, you said it yourself... 'without redundancy' and based on your next sentence, it also sounds like 'without backup'.



2. It's quite easy. You just restore your data from your backup RAID(Z) is not backup. Trying to recover data from a failed array is going about it the wrong way if you ask me.



3. A mirror. RAID-Z requires 3 devices.

1. no the drive was fine. The system just spat the dummy. Reading up on ZFS data recovery nearly made my brain hemorrhage . I didnt have the time available to be able to rescue the data - the learning curve would have taken weeks.

But yes, agreed - it was stupid not to have a backup. Learned my lesson from that.

2. Ooops... my bad. The rest of the plan (which I didnt mention) is (a) an external NTFS hdd attached to the rig, and (b) Amazon S3 (or similar) for critical files.

3. So in terms of the Array, I seem to have misunderstood RAIDZ: Its a 4-bay chassis, and it sounds like that if I use RAIDZ I have to use three of the slots(?) - thats not great because then I cant add storage. So possibly a better plan would be hardware raid1? - so then just simple mirror with two disks so I can add an additional pair at a later date if need be?

..
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post #4 of 5
3/12/12 at 4:18pm
Good place to ask this question is ....FreeNAS 8 Forum
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post #5 of 5
3/12/12 at 4:20pm
I rely on ZFS on Freenas 7.

It isn't intuitive. What exactly the issue?

If you have a bad drive you can't just swap it and expect it to redo the array. You will have to give a couple of commands to get it to resilver.
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