froggit Wrote:You can use different sized drives, but the smallest capacity will be used. E.g. 500GB, 1TB drives used, will only give 500GB capacity for a mirror.
So yes you can do this, but in reality you plan ahead and chuck a bunch of same-sized drives into a new vdev when expanding the pool, or building a new system.
Then there is the main disadvantage of ZFS compared to
Unraid.
With my
Unraid box when I need more space I can go on Newegg and buy ANY hard drive I want of any size, add it to my array and enjoy all the space on the drive while still having a single drive for parity.
Many consumers don't like buying all their drives all at once, and that is why commercial consumer solutions for servers like WHS advertise the ability to mix and match drive sizes above everything else they do.
In fact from what you are telling me, ZFS seems to be a slight disadvantage to my old RAID 5 server in that you can't add drives to existing vdev.
So basically with all the vdevs you end up with a server with MANY different arrays that have pooled storage. But it seems you can't add single drives and get parity protection on those drives- you have to at least add two drives!
At least my old RAID 5 server would let you grow the array and add additional drives of the same size later without "wasting" more space on parity.
Quote:ZFS was designed for business users, where the prospect of adding 4 or 6 drives etc does not make the person cry about the cost of the drives.
Which is why I think
Unraid is a better home media server solution for people that DON'T want to buy every drive in their 20 bay Norco at one, yet don't want to waste more than one drive for parity in that Norco through its entire life as a server.
Quote:This gave me the capacity of all the drives added together, so no capacity was lost. But crucially, this configuration had no redundancy, as the vdev specified no parity, so if a drive died I would lose everything because the data is striped across the drives.
That is nothing special, just a fancier JBOD. What makes
Unraid special is you can have that exact same setup AND have parity protection. That is why some people (like me especially) are willing to pay for it.
Quote:To me, my data is still data regardless of what type of data it is, and I am not willing to lose any of it, or go through re-ripping exercises, identifying movie folder names accurately again prior to XBMC library scraping. This is time I simply do not have, or at least am not willing to do again. And for those reasons, I am not willing to lose any data.
It seems like it comes down to how you fear losing your data.
You fear "bit rot" and the fact that
Unraid/RAID 5 only has one parity drive. Hence you use ZFS.
I fear drives wearing out because you have to run them all the time in a stripped array, or that if one more drive is lost during a rebuild than I had in parity than all my data is lost. Hence I use
Unraid.
Quote:But each person is different, and so each person needs to decide what's important to them and choose a solution that fits their needs.
This is where I completely agree 100%. No solution is perfect, and they all have downsides.
For me personally all I wanted was a media server that gave a least a little parity protection (so if a drive dies), while allowing me to mix and match drive sizes so I can always buy what is cheapest at the time I need the space. Bonus that
Unraid runs off a pen drive to allow me to use all my sata ports for storage, and that
Unraid has a super tweaked SMB that makes the default SMB setup in Ubuntu seem like a snail.
You wanted a business class system with all the features you mentioned. Which is awesome.
Each to their own, and both are capable of streaming a Blu Ray rip to a XBMC box. That is all that really matters in this context.