Help me choose a storage file system to use

Soldato
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Pretty much what skyripper said. The disks can be passthrough to VM to be managed by freenas zfs raid system. No hardware raid to pass to zfs so on. I am not entirely sure if VM disks works. Not dared to try it and not bothered to research into it either.
 
Soldato
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I use UnRAID for exactly this.

Yes it isn't free, but I've got multiple VMs (inc pfsense with NIC passthrough), Win 10 VM (steam streaming with a RX560 as a test), dual parity, docker support (Plex!) and much much more.

Use brtfs on cache drives if you need (I use xfs across the board).

Yes it isnt free but there is a free version to play around with (not sure what the limitations are).

Not used FreeNAS or equivalents but I'm 100% happy with UnRAID.
 
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I use UnRAID for exactly this.

Yes it isn't free, but I've got multiple VMs (inc pfsense), dual parity, docker support (Plex!) and much much more.

Yes it isnt free but there is a free version to play around with (not sure what the limitations are).

Not used FreeNAS or equivalents but I'm 100% happy with UnRAID.

Thanks for the input!

I think the free version is only for 30 days, so maybe if I have trouble with a free solution I will try it out to see if it works and if it does I can think about paying :)
 
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Right, but doesn't that not really protect against drive failure? Just errors.

Of course. However, the link megatron posted says "RAID5 should never be used for anything where you value keeping your data" based on the manufacturer specs on URE rates and sizes of RAID arrays these days. My point is that the raw advice doesn't take into account other factors such as scrubs and backups, which are important in their own right; once you have these, then you might consider RAIDZ to be good enough for your use case. Also consider that a URE on a RAIDZ will put at risk rather less than what a RAID5 failure would - see the top answer here.
 
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Of course. However, the link megatron posted says "RAID5 should never be used for anything where you value keeping your data" based on the manufacturer specs on URE rates and sizes of RAID arrays these days. My point is that the raw advice doesn't take into account other factors such as scrubs and backups, which are important in their own right; once you have these, then you might consider RAIDZ to be good enough for your use case. Also consider that a URE on a RAIDZ will put at risk rather less than what a RAID5 failure would - see the top answer here.

Oh okay, I see your point now. Whereas I agree with you on all points, 1 parity disk still scares the hell out of me, I just wouldn't be comfortable with it.

Regular scrubs and an actual backup will definitely be a part of my storage setup though.
 
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Oh okay, I see your point now. Whereas I agree with you on all points, 1 parity disk still scares the hell out of me, I just wouldn't be comfortable with it.

Regular scrubs and an actual backup will definitely be a part of my storage setup though.

If you're keen on addressing risks to your data and choose to use a filesystem that checksums and validates your data (like ZFS) then also consider whether your RAM is reliable enough too.
 
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I use UnRAID for exactly this.

Yes it isn't free, but I've got multiple VMs (inc pfsense with NIC passthrough), Win 10 VM (steam streaming with a RX560 as a test), dual parity, docker support (Plex!) and much much more.

Use brtfs on cache drives if you need (I use xfs across the board).

Yes it isnt free but there is a free version to play around with (not sure what the limitations are).

Not used FreeNAS or equivalents but I'm 100% happy with UnRAID.

Out of interest, what hardware are you running this on?
 
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I'll get slated here for a windows build but my home server, which is used for Plex, as well as running various Linux VMs for things like an apache ssl proxy, pihole, etc, is:

i5 4560
16GB ram
6xWD Red Pro 7200RPM
2x Samsung 830 256GB
1x random 120GB mSATA boot SSD.

I have the 830s and the WDs in a Windows Storage spaces tiered, mirrored array. I configured this with server 2016 trial, then installed windows 10 (which can run tiered arrays just not create them because reasons), running ReFS.

I'm not a fan of RAID 5 or 6 or 50/60, the parity calculations make it too slow. With mirroring, I lose 50% of the capacity, but with raid 6 I would be losing 33% of the capacity here. I gain a lot in speed tho.

The tiering really makes a difference. It massively improves the performance. ZFS doesn't really do tiering, although you can use an L2arc cache etc, this is not the same thing and doesn't bring the same benefits.

I'm very happy with the setup!
 
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