Now that I have had a few days to form an opinion on ZFS, I will provide a more in-depth analysis, while still only scratching the surface. Before I begin, let me explain my build.
- AMD ASROCK E350M1-USB3 Mini-ITX Motherboard (4x SATA 3 ports, all on a single controller as it seems)
- 4GB DDR3 1333 RAM (1x4GB)
- 2x2TB HDDs (2 new and cheap, 1 external that is 6 months old that I pulled out of its case)
- 1x120GB 2.5″ HDD manufactured in June 2007, used as ext4 root
ZFS as a whole is amazing. Copy-on-write, clones, snapshots, compression, deduplication, NFS sharing, SMB sharing (not on Linux yet), and encryption (currently Solaris closed-source only) are some of its best features, to name a few. The features are simply astounding, which is what makes ZFS the volume manager of choice (I say volume manager because its package contains more than just a filesystem) for anyone who is interested in managing the way their data is stored. Personally, I have no real need for ZFS; I have plenty of space, copies of my data in two physical locations 700 miles apart, and infrequent hard copies of my data. The real motivator for trying ZFS is pure “sport,” if you will. Without further ado, here follows my notes on the whole setup. I began my setup with Pendor’s guide over at Github.
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