Would XFS or ZFS best suit my needs?

[Connor19]

Hi guys! I build myself a NAS in december for a few reasons which are:

1. To Store my backups of my main PC instead of using an external hard drive

2. General storage of large files (I digitise tapes so often deal with 50+GB video files)

3. Plex server with plenty of 4K large files

4. Virtual windows 11 machine for doing large video conversions that use a lot of CPU resources, allowing me to game and in the background convert large files with no performance hit on my PC.

 

Originally I was all for going with Unraid but was then convinced that Truenas scale was the way to go and therefore build myself a NAS with these specs:

 

Asus W680 Motherboard

i7-14700K CPU

64GB DDR5 ECC memory

Nvidia Quadro T400 GPU (for passthrough for the VM)

3x Seagate Ironwolf Pro 16TB (Currently in a RaidZ1 on Truenas scale)

1x Sabrent M.2 1TB (used for cache)

2x Sabrent M.2 500GB (used for mirror boot drives, I know these are probably going to be useless on Unraid and will happily sell these)

 

Truenas scale has just given me issues, constant bugs and in 3 months I haven't been able to start a single VM due to all of the random bugs I have been encountering that aren't getting fixed, and looking at the complexity of it I don't think I need 99% of its features for my own home server. 

 

I am just wondering what filesystem is best for me to use on Unraid as I do want performance and reliability and don't want my plex performance to suffer. I like the ability to add drives in XFS but am willing to go without it if the performance benefits of ZFS will be worth my while with my hardware. One concern I had with XFS was file transfer speed when it came to moving multiple 50+GB files onto the NAS.

 

I should also mention that I do have 10GB networking between my PC and NAS.

 

Sorry if this sounds noobish, I am new to Nas/Home server setups so I am trying to learn as much as I can.

 

Thanks guys

[JorgeB]

Xfs can only be used in the array or single device pools, if you want the better performance that comes with striping disks, use a zfs pool instead.