Very Long Parity Checks 7+ Hrs... Considering ZFS Migration

[DavidRas]

Good evening Everyone,

 

One of my Unraid servers has an array comprised of 4 3TB disks and a 3TB parity disk. When something causes my server to crash, In this case, Immich, it takes approximately 8 hrs for my parity check to complete. Would switching to the ZFS file system avoid the parity check? I'm thinking , yes. If so, what is the best way to proceed without having to rebuild the server from scratch?

[xokia]

8hrs........Think my last parity build was 33hrs

[d4man]

The time sounds about normal, try to avoid having a crash or an unclean shutdown. I have 3) Seagate Ironwolf 8TB and my weekly parity check takes 9-10 hours

[itimpi]

5 hours ago, d4man said:

weekly parity check

That is more frequent than most people go for.  Monthly or even less frequently is far more common.

[Kilrah]

You need to find/elimintate the reason for the crashes. 

ZFS would avoid the parity check but you'd risk corruption just as much, and with a zpool if it gets corrupted you lose the entire data on the pool, not just one disk. 

And you'd need to rebuild from scratch to switch.

Edited April 14 by Kilrah

[DavidRas]

The cause of the crashes was Immich. I have been trying to get it to work over the past couple of weeks, but it crashes my server when it tries to import my rather large photo collection. This in turn, caused lengthy parity checks each time it crashed. So, I'm no longer pursuing that and have removed it from my server.  And as much as I like Unraid, the lengthy parity checks can be rather inconvenient when a crash happens unexpectedly. So now I'm considering converting to ZFS (RAIDZ1 perhaps) to avoid these party checks. I'm not concerned about having to rebuild the server from scratch.

 

Any thoughts on this? Suggestions? Recommendations? Concerns? Is it worth it to migrate to ZFS?

 

Thanks...

 

 

[Kilrah]

As mentioned, no. Unexpected crashes should not happen. As long as they do a parity check is the least of your worries, and regardless of filesystem you'll run into problems. 

[DavidRas]

I have been in the IT industry long enough to know that unexpected crashes do happen for numerous reasons. But that aside, my main reason for starting this topic was to get input regarding whether or not changing the file system type on my Unraid server in an attempt to avoid lengthy parity checks is worth it.