Am 27.12.2012 01:18, schrieb Alan McKinnon: > On Tue, 25 Dec 2012 07:41:01 -0800 > Mark Knecht <markkne...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> Hi, >> Merry Christmas to all. >> >> Upgrading an external USB2 drive at home this Christmas morning to >> 1TB for more video storage space. One large partition, non-raid, files >> are around 1GB. The drive holds only static video files that get >> written once and don't change or get erased. No MythTV stuff or >> anything like that. >> >> This disk reside on my main desktop machine and gets backed up >> every couple of days to another USB2 drive (FAT formatted >> unfortunately) which attaches to the TV. >> >> With the previous local drive I used ext3 and have had no problems. >> I'm just wondering if there's a better choice & why. > > > I am *very* impressed with ZFS for this. Yes, I know, it's not really > there on Linux - I use it on FreeBSD (FreeNAS). > > It has everything I've wanted in a filesystem for a long time, and all > the crap I've stuffed into my head over many years related to storage > just goes away. It doesn't go to some place I don't have to deal with > it, it just ceases to exist. Very nice. > > There is no more weird partitions from the days of DOS, no PV/VG/LV to > remember the details of. There is only storage and ZFS knows what I > want to happen with each "chunk" of it. A "chunk" (my term) in this > context is a directory and everything below it. > > ZFS doesn't have partitions and filesystems. It has volumes. A volume > is sort of a cross between a filesystem (you mount it and can assign > quotas to it) and a directory (you assign permissions and ownerships to > it). You can overcommit storage space and quotas - you do not get "disk > full" errors and three days of nightmares while you figure out how to > deal with this. the FS just tells you it used more than the allocated > space and keeps telling you till you get it under the limit. > > mv'ing a few TB of video to a different FS to free up space is not fun > at all, but with ZFS it's like an mv on the same FS (that volume thing > again). It checksums every write and lets you know if things fail. It > has proper snapshots built in - that's proper as in copy-on-write so > they don't really take up space until you start modifying files. Your > media collection is like mine - I only add to it and seldom delete, so > I have months of snapshots that consume about 1% extras space. Dale's > rm problem cannot happen to me anymore hehehehe ;-) > > In summary, it does everything I want and does it well. It can also do > other things I don't want but others might (eg de-dupe). > >
I am a big fan of zfs myself. I use zfsonlinx on my workstation (only /usr/portage and /usr/src atm, but with on-the-fly compression, very nice on my small SSD). Unfortunately the zfs implementation is a few large steps behind zfs on *bsd Migrating my NAS to ZFS is something that has been floating around my head for a longer time. But I am not really sure if I want to switch from gentoo to FreeBSD on my NAS. zfsonlinux is there, but it's first release was early 2011, so it's still pretty young. I guess for the time being I stick to an old credo: never touch a running system
