(SOLVED) Complete new server, format questions

[kristisdad]

I built a new unraid server in the past couple of days, many hours spent perusing many forums only to get many questions.  I have a 3TB parity drive, two 3TB data drives and a 250G SSD for cache drive using v6b12.  My understanding, very limited, would be to format the data drives using ZFS and the cache drive as btrfs.  Do I need to format the parity drive?

 

I have the AsRock Z97 Extreme4 mobo, therefore, using non-ECC memory, so did I do myself in as far as the ZFS format goes?  Will this affect the performance?

 

When I want to clean shutdown from the command prompt after booting up, what are the commands?  In other words, not using the Webgui.

[trurl]

unRAID doesn't support ZFS. Perhaps you meant XFS. That is the default for data drives now. unRAID will offer to format the drives when you assign them to the array or cache and start the array. Do not attempt to format them yourself from the command line. Parity has no file system so no format and unRAID will not offer to format a drive selected for the parity slot.

 

Search the forum for the preclear script. It is a good way to test the drives and many people will not even consider using a drive that has not been tested this way. Preclear can also save some downtime when adding new drives to a protected array. Once you have a parity-protected array, unRAID will want any added array drives to be zeroed so it will match parity. If you don't preclear, unRAID will do it and take the array offline while it does.

 

It is best to use the webGUI for stopping the array and shutting down or rebooting, but it can be done from the command line. Search for the powerdown plugin.

 

[kristisdad]

Sorry 'bout that, I did mean XFS.  I follow you except for the cache drive, should that not be btrfs?  When i look under format, it just lumps all three drives into the format as XFS, should I take out the cache drive format the data and then replace the cache?  I'm lost at the gate….

 

Right or wrong, it's done.  Waiting on parity check and then on to the next challenge.  I don't remember all this on my 5.0.4 server.

[excaluber]

I just built a new server about a week ago, and based on all the reading I did, you're in the right direction.  (Or at least I hope so because I did the exact same thing). I went xfs for all array drives and Btrfs for my ssd cache drive.

 

Based on posts and a couple of the blog articles from line-tech (see main website).  They all seemed to recommend going that direction.  If you can't find the blog articles they wrote let me know and I'll link to the ones I'm talking about.

[itimpi]

XFS seems to be the recommended format for the data drives at the moment.  If anything goes wrong that leads to file system corruption, then the recovery tools for XFS are much more mature than those for BTRFS.  Those for the previous default of Reiserfs are also very good, but unRAID is moving away from Reiserfs due to the lack of developers supporting that format.

 

As far as the cache drive is concerned, XFS still seems to be the recommended format for maximum stability.  In some of the earlier beta releases there was a requirement to have a BTRFS format drive to support dockers, so some people selected BTRFS for the cache drive.  This requirement is no longer the case as Dockers are now hosted in a disk image file that can reside on any of the formats that unRAID supports so docker support is no longer a driver for using BTRFS format for the cache.  The one time you DO need to select BTRFS if you want to use a drive pool (i.e. multiple drives) for the cache.

 

Generally I think that the recommendation is currently to use XFS unless you have a specific requirement that mandates BTRFS.  As BTRFS matures this recommendation could change but reaching that stage is likely to be some years away.