Hi All. I very rarely post but I do lurk occasionally totry and expand my knowledge and fine tune my server. So I really appreciate the the time and effort everyone makes to share their experiences.

 

With that in mind I just wanted to share my own experience when moving my cache from BTRFS to ZFS.

 

Originally I had x2 NVME SSD (both formatted BTRFS) in addition to my x5 Disk HDD Array (formatted XFS) that spins down.

 

x1 Samsung SM961 256GB used as Cache for Appdata etc.

x1 Samsung 990 Pro 1TB used as Media Cache for Media.

 

I recently bought x2 Crucial T500 2TB NVME SSDs and reconfigured everything as follows:

 

x1 Samsung 990 Pro 1TB (formatted ZFS) used as Cache for Appdata etc.

x1 Samsung SM961 256GB (formatted ZFS) used as Back-up Pool for ZFS Snaphots and backups.

x2 Crucial T500 2TB (formatted BTRFS) mirrored and used as Media Pool. Mover Tuner moves media to the Array based on age once the pool is above 90%

 

Note: My Smart Plug at the wall measures the server, router and UPS combined. So the value for the Server alone is about 10W less than the figures shown below.

 

When the cache was formatted to BTRFS my smart plug showed around 40W when idle but every few seconds would spike to 70W. I figured this could have been the UPS.

Now the cache is formatted ZFS my smart plug shows around 40W when idle but no longer spikes. It just sits there at a near constant 40W.

 

Everything I'd read suggested ZFS would be more power hungry. Is it the file system making the difference or could it be the 990 Pro is more simply more efficient than the SM961?

 

This is with an Intel i5-12600K in an MSI PRO Z790-P WiFi with 32GB DDR5 powered by a Cooler Master V650 Gold V2.

 

 

 

Edited March 12, 20251 yr by BoutTime

Seems very unlikely to me that just the filesystem change would cause that, but won't say it's impossible.