Interesting article about the hidden cost of ZFS in a soho/home environment

[spants]

http://louwrentius.com/the-hidden-cost-of-using-zfs-for-your-home-nas.html

 

 

[jonp]

Nice find and thanks for sharing.  Right at the beginning of the article, the author pretty much calls out the reason we choose to incorporate BTRFS over ZFS:

 

With ZFS, you either have to buy all storage you expect to need upfront, or you will be wasting a few hard drives on redundancy you don't need.

 

This fact is often overlooked, but it's very important when you are planning your build.

 

Other software RAID solutions like Linux MDADM lets you grow an existing RAID array with one disk at a time. This is also true for many hardware-based RAID solutions. This is ideal for home users because you can expand as you need.

 

ZFS does not allow this!

 

It's hilarious how often I see discussions about ZFS vs. BTRFS when it fails on such a fundamental level for consumers.  What folks need to remember is that ZFS was not designed with consumer use in mind...at all.  It was designed as an enterprise-grade filesystem for large corporations and cloud providers, where things like "cost" and "ease of use" and "flexibility" aren't top priority items.  A business customer doesn't care about the limitations of ZFS in these areas.

 

So while it's easy to get caught up on all of BTRFS' wonderful features that compare to that of ZFS, it is in the areas of ease of use and flexible expansion that really makes it stand out for ideal inclusion with unRAID.

[ashman70]

NVM