I'm a long-time Unraid user and I am finally at the point where I am outgrowing my current storage capacity. I have some thoughts on how to rebuild things to set myself up right, but I wouldn't mind hearing some opinions about what I'm going for. My use case is pretty simple, no VMs, all docker objects, mostly the ~arr stack + Emby. Primarily used as a media host with limited usage throughout the day (Only locally, no public consumption)

 

First my current build:

 

8x8TB drives in XFS, 2 being used as parity for 48TB of effective storage, about 84% utilized.

2 1TB NVME Cache Drives

 

My new intended build:

 

10x10TB drives in ZFS2, for 80TB of effective storage

4x3.84TB 2.5" SSDs for cache

 

My chassis will hold 10 3.5" and 4 2.5" drives, but short term for data migration I intend to plug in all 24 drives to migrate data, then retire the old drives.

 

I've done reading on the differences between ZFS and XFS, and I'm mostly looking at ZFS because it's new and shiny, but I don't see anything that's going to be revolutionary for me, but maybe I'm not fully understanding why it would be the better choice here (or maybe sticking with XFS would be).

 

I also have a couple of questions I'm hoping to get answers to:

 

1. Can I just add new drives to the main array as ZFS drives? Is there a downside to doing it this way instead of just creating a new Pool?

2. Would a dedicated ZFS pool be the recommended way of doing this instead and migrating the data over?

 

Is there anything I'm missing? Thanks in advance for any help!

11 hours ago, Unluck said:

Can I just add new drives to the main array as ZFS drives?

If you want to use raidz2, the drives must be added to a pool, not the array.