
How I Store My 1's and 0′s (2012) - Tomte
https://mocko.org.uk/b/2012/06/17/how-i-store-my-1s-and-0s-zfs-bargain-hp-microserver-joy/
======
mocko
[Original] OP here.

I wrote this five years ago and it stands up pretty well. HP Microservers are
a great device but if I were to build a new one today I'd look into using one
of the many cheap ARM boards (NB: ZFS allegedly needs 64-bit to be stable)
with disks in a USB-attached enclosure. Performance with USB3 should be enough
for any home NAS and the hardware should come out even cheaper. There may even
be ARM-based NAS boxes on the market that'll do the job.

~~~
nrki
I'd recommend against using raid-z(X) on a USB enclosure. The throughput to
each disk just isn't there.

Also, my experiences using ZFS(onlinux) without any raid (i.e. single disk
with "copies=" > 1) is that it wasn't very resilient against any kind of I/O
error - even if the cable was bumped or something. This has resulted in the
loss of a whole zpool and restore from backup.

~~~
ashark
> even if the cable was bumped or something. This has resulted in the loss of
> a whole zpool and restore from backup.

Yikes. Is it similarly fragile in the event of sudden power loss?

------
whack
For anyone who's too lazy/dumb to do the above, just buy a couple portable
Hard Drives on amazon. For ~$110, you can get a 4TB drive that fits in your
pocket. I buy a new one every couple years when the previous one has filled
up, which automatically ensures that I have more than enough older drives
lying around to back up anything I care about. No power needed, no OS
maintenance, no booting up, no spinning fans, immediate data transfers over
USB 3.0, and oh, did I mention you can carry it in your pocket.

~~~
ashark
You'd want to couple this with some ability to check data integrity and you'd
still need an offsite backup of some kind—plus you'll need a third copy anyway
to recover if your primary fails and you plug the cold backup drive in only to
find it's dead, which isn't unlikely enough not to worry about, or one or more
files are corrupt, or whatever. Some inexpensive cloud storage service or a
second (ideally different brand) cheap external stored elsewhere would do,
though the latter's really inconvenient.

------
zokier
ZFS is great and all, but I'd like to see more comparisons between different
ZFS "distros"/forks/versions. Afaik (almost?) all current ones are based on
OpenZFS upstream, but it is difficult to find what version of it various
distros have used, and what sort of customizations have been added. The main
ones I'd be interested in hearing more of are:

* FreeBSD/FreeNAS

* ZFS on Linux/Ubuntu ZFS

* Illumos derivates (SmartOS/OmniOS/OI)

~~~
tgragnato
Feature flags ?

\- [http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Feature_Flags](http://open-
zfs.org/wiki/Feature_Flags)

\- [http://illumos.org/man/5/zpool-features](http://illumos.org/man/5/zpool-
features)

\- [https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=zpool-
features&apr...](https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=zpool-
features&apropos=0&sektion=7&manpath=FreeBSD+11-current&arch=default&format=html)

\-
[https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/blob/master/man/man5/zpool...](https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/blob/master/man/man5/zpool-
features.5)

------
excalibur
It's hard to ignore improper apostrophe usage when it's featured this
prominently.

~~~
dubya
It's widely accepted to use an apostrophe s to form the plural of single digit
numbers. See, for example,
[https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/punctuation/apostrophe](https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/punctuation/apostrophe)

(This comes up a lot in math for variable names too)

~~~
excalibur
It appears you are correct, thanks for pointing this out. It's pretty amusing
that I was just schooled on grammar by somebody who calls himself "dubya". :)

------
blahshaw
I know the author probably didn't mean anything by it, but I dislike the
implication that only a dude could bring ZFS to Linux.

~~~
Raphmedia
Stop trying to push some bullshit agendas.

"In the early 1960s, dude became prominent in surfer culture as a synonym of
guy or fella. The female equivalent was "dudette" or "dudess," but these have
both fallen into disuse, and "dude" is now also used as a unisex term."
-Wikipedia

I've yet to hear anyone use "dudette" or "dudess" while I see "dude" applied
to females all the time.

