Soon™️ 6.12 Series

[xaositek]

Did you see?! UNRAID OS VERSION 6.12.0-RC5!!! 

[Stumpy]

I searched and didnt find, can unraid support both ZFS pools and unraid arrays at the same time?

What I was thinking was to have a small zfs mirror/pool for critical data and then a jbod unraid array for the (much) larger collection of less-critical data (like all my linux ISOs :P).

Ideally I could have 2-3 shares setup to only use a zfs pool, and the other shares to use the jbod array; doable?

Also, it seems that i'd pretty much have most of the "data integrity functionality" of zfs like copy on write, Sync writes, etc? Also would I be able to use tools like sanoid/syncoid? 

Edited May 3, 2023 by Stumpy
just elaborating on my question

[Kilrah]

Yes of course.

[House Of Cards]

On 5/1/2023 at 7:01 PM, xaositek said:

Did you see?! UNRAID OS VERSION 6.12.0-RC5!!! 

What does "stable imminent" mean?.......  soon.  LOL

[Pete0]

On 4/20/2023 at 8:45 AM, JorgeB said:

Correct if you talking about a pool, you could have array disks formatted with zfs, and in that case a single file will still be in a single disk.

Are there advantages when using single drives in a parity array using zfs compared to xfs? Only thing I keep hearing is built-in compression.

[jonathanselye]

11 hours ago, House Of Cards said:

What does "stable imminent" mean?.......  soon.  LOL

It means another RC, Hello RC6!!

[House Of Cards]

4 hours ago, jonathanselye said:

It means another RC, Hello RC6!!

Really?  LOL

 

I'm not on the beta, so waiting for stable to drop is like waiting for presents.  Web site only shows RC5 with a note that stable is expected in a couple days.  But the blog is dated May 1, so...  I dunno.  🤣

[jonathanselye]

4 hours ago, House Of Cards said:

Really?  LOL

 

I'm not on the beta, so waiting for stable to drop is like waiting for presents.  Web site only shows RC5 with a note that stable is expected in a couple days.  But the blog is dated May 1, so...  I dunno.  🤣

Its better to wait than have a rushed uncooked OS, just trust the unraid/limetech team :)) just like you im also excited for the stable release but im on the RC now on my main server and so far it is rock solid.

[JorgeB]

9 hours ago, Pete0 said:

Are there advantages when using single drives in a parity array using zfs compared to xfs? Only thing I keep hearing is built-in compression.

Basically same as using btrfs: checksums, snapshots, source or target for send/receive. 

[brandon3055]

I have been running zfs for a couple of weeks now. It's Nice! The thing I missed most when I switched to unraid was the write speed. Granted, It's not often you need it, but on those rare occasions when you need to transfer multiple hundreds of Gigabytes... It's so nice! Not to mention snapshots and self-healing!

It's just rather annoying that I need the parasitic USB drives in the main array just so I can turn it on. I really hope we get an option to use a ZFS pool as the main array. Those drives serve absolutely no purpose, They just consume two slots, which I would have much rather used on additional drives in my zfs pool.

[JorgeB]

25 minutes ago, brandon3055 said:

I really hope we get an option to use a ZFS pool as the main array.

That's already been announced, array requirement should be gone for 6.13.

[Kilrah]

2 hours ago, brandon3055 said:

They just consume two slots, which I would have much rather used on additional drives in my zfs pool.

No point using one for parity for a dummy drive you're not using anyway...

[itimpi]

34 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

No point using one for parity for a dummy drive you're not using anyway...

Agree, but it is only USB slots being used so should not affect any pools.

[Kilrah]

31 minutes ago, itimpi said:

Agree, but it is only USB slots being used so should not affect any pools.

 

Since they have 12 devices on the screenshot I think they're complaining about them counting towards the limit of the Plus licence. 

[itimpi]

19 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

 

Since they have 12 devices on the screenshot I think they're complaining about them counting towards the limit of the Plus licence. 

Ok - then having the parity drive as well is really senseless.

[brandon3055]

9 hours ago, Kilrah said:

No point using one for parity for a dummy drive you're not using anyway...

 

8 hours ago, itimpi said:

Ok - then having the parity drive as well is really senseless.

I have two reasons for this.

First is reliability. If that USB drive randomly fails, The entire system fails. 
Granted, this is already the case with the Boot USB, but unraid does everything possible to minimise load on that USB.

And if it fails, the system will continue running until next reboot. I don't know what happens if the only array disk randomly decides to fail.

The other reason is there does not seem to be a way to turn off the warning icons that show up when the array is unprotected.
They get annoying after a while. Especially the favicon.

[House Of Cards]

15 hours ago, brandon3055 said:

I have been running zfs for a couple of weeks now. It's Nice! The thing I missed most when I switched to unraid was the write speed. Granted, It's not often you need it, but on those rare occasions when you need to transfer multiple hundreds of Gigabytes... It's so nice! Not to mention snapshots and self-healing!

It's just rather annoying that I need the parasitic USB drives in the main array just so I can turn it on. I really hope we get an option to use a ZFS pool as the main array. Those drives serve absolutely no purpose, They just consume two slots, which I would have much rather used on additional drives in my zfs pool.

 

I came from TrueNAS.  Yes, ZFS is rock solid for sure.  I could never kill it. I have disks with failing sectors in there right now, and who cares?  I can lose three drives before I lose the array, and it's all backed up anyhow.

 

The reason I left TrueNAS is because in that pretty screenshot above, if you ever need more space, you will have to upgrade 8 hard drives to get it.  I can't justify $1000 every time I need a few more TB of space, but if it works for you, it's a great file system.

 

Once I'm done moving everything, I'm going to repurpose that TrueNAS machine as a backup server.  Use RSYNC to copy (push) files over to TrueNAS, and let snapshots keep a long-term history.  Perfect.  Indestructible.

[House Of Cards]

17 hours ago, jonathanselye said:

Its better to wait than have a rushed uncooked OS, just trust the unraid/limetech team :)) just like you im also excited for the stable release but im on the RC now on my main server and so far it is rock solid.

 

Agreed.  First and foremost, I want stable.  I built my current server (first UnRAID server) two months ago, and am still configuring and transferring files.  Slow and steady, doing it right.  So far, the flexibility of UnRAID over TrueNAS wins hands down.

 

TrueNAS/ZFS is rock solid though.  I became quite the ZFS veteran using TrueNAS, but the upgrades just cost a small fortune.  In that system I have 5 drives.  RaidZ2 with hot spare.  Of the five drives, only two drives of space are usable, but I can lose three.  Indestructible in practice, but adding space means buying 5 drives each time.

 

I think the ZFS novelty factor will wear off, and many people who jumped on are going to find when the time comes to add a few TB of storage, they may not like the price tag.  To each his own, though.  They are both great in different ways.

[brandon3055]

4 hours ago, House Of Cards said:

The reason I left TrueNAS is because in that pretty screenshot above, if you ever need more space, you will have to upgrade 8 hard drives to get it.  I can't justify $1000 every time I need a few more TB of space, but if it works for you, it's a great file system.

This was also a major contributing factor when I originally switched to unraid. 
But now with a more stable income and the ever decreasing cost of drives, it made sense for me to build a new array from scratch.
It should cover my needs for a few years, and by the time I need to upgrade again I will most likely be ready to retire those drives to my backup server and upgrade to a set of new, higher capacity drives.

Edited May 19, 2023 by brandon3055

[House Of Cards]

11 hours ago, brandon3055 said:

It should cover my needs for a few years, and by the time I need to upgrade again I will most likely be ready to retire those drives to my backup server and upgrade to a set of new, higher capacity drives.

The strategy I used was deciding what the next "need" in space would be, and replacing drives to that size when swapping drives with bad sectors, etc...  Of course, I originally purchased 3TB drives which for some reason, seem to fail quite a bit. 

 

Just curious, what RAID level did you go with for 8 drives?  Z1, Z2, Z3? 

[Gascan]

I have a question that I haven't been able to find an answer to about zfs. If I set up a standard array on my production server with disks formatted in ZFS and have a backup server running a ZFS pool, will I be able to use ZFS send to back one up to the other? Thanks, kind of a noob here.

[brandon3055]

4 hours ago, House Of Cards said:

Just curious, what RAID level did you go with for 8 drives?  Z1, Z2, Z3? 

I am running Z2. For my use case, any more than that would be excessive.
These are WD Red Plus drives, so they should be pretty reliable. 
And all important data on this server will be backed up to a secondary server made from my old nas. 

[JorgeB]

10 hours ago, Gascan said:

If I set up a standard array on my production server with disks formatted in ZFS and have a backup server running a ZFS pool, will I be able to use ZFS send to back one up to the other?

 

You can, you'll need do send one snapshot per disk, but it's not a problem as long as the pool has enough space, e.g.:

 

zfs send disk1/dataset_name@snapshot_name | zfs receive pool_name/disk1
zfs send disk2/dataset_name@snapshot_name | zfs receive pool_name/disk2

etc

 

These can also be incremental after the initial snap send.

[Gascan]

11 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

 

You can, you'll need do send one snapshot per disk, but it's not a problem as long as the pool has enough space, e.g.:

 

zfs send disk1/dataset_name@snapshot_name | zfs receive pool_name/disk1
zfs send disk2/dataset_name@snapshot_name | zfs receive pool_name/disk2

etc

 

These can also be incremental after the initial snap send.

Awesome, Thank You!

[jonathanselye]

Now that we can use ZFS on main array, what is the difference of automatically created zfs share vs manually created zfs with the same name on the disk, share, will it affect data integrity or will it be technically the same?