EXT4, ZFS or something else

CraigG · 15. Januar 2021

Hello All,

Looking for some opinions and sage advice please. I have a server with dual Xeon processors that I will be putting a number of hard drives in. I plan to have two arrays - one for backing up photos, digital music, laptop etc. This will likely be a RAID5 array of 2TB drives (Yes it also goes off site as RAID is not true backup). A second array will be storage for a Plex server so I'm looking for some fault tolerance but decent read speed.

So my question is what's the best file system for setting up these arrays? Is ZFS reliable on OMV? Does it do RAID (I've read a little about RAIDZ)? What overhead will this put on the server vs ext4? (I've 48GB of ECC RAM)

Is there another file system that I should be thinking about? If so why?

Thanks - all opinions welcome.

MarcS · 15. Januar 2021

I have used ZFS RAIDZ1 (=RAID5) for 2 years. Works really well, has a OMV plugin and is reliable.

I added an SDD for Logging and Caching which added to performance.

I dont feel any significant performance drop from ext4 and the benefits are plenty as you will know.

You could also look at BTRFS which has a RAID option. I am running BTRFS on another server but without RAID.

And for mainly static files such as Photos, Music etc I'd really encourage to check out Snapraid.

It is not a true Raid solution but it provides the same or better protection than RAID and has many advantages.

Snapraid also has an OMV Plugin which works well.

CraigG · 16. Januar 2021

Thank you. I hadn''t considered BTRFS and I've never heard of snapraid until now. More reading needed I think. I'm open to others view and opinions as well. All input is welcome.

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