Aidan Gauland writes:
I want to set up a file server on my home LAN with just consumer-grade hardware, and run Debian stable on it. For hardware, I am probably going to get a refurbished mid-range tower with a four to six 3.5" SATA drive capacity, and put WD Reds in it.What I'm not sure of which filesystem to use. I could just use ext4 with RAID5 or RAID6 to get striping with some fault tolerance (i.e. time to replace a failed drive without losing everything). ZFS looks easier, but only if you're on BSD. btrfs sounds like ZFS for Linux, but it appears to still be of beta quality, and I can't tell whether it can yet do striping with parity. Any advice?
Hello,I'd recommend the ext4 filesystem in combination with RAID1 with MDADM of each two devices such that you have two or three filesystems.
If everything needs to be a single filesystem, I'd go for RAID10. I'd stay away from either btrfs or ZFS for these reasons:btrfs: There have been multiple reports of data loss or difficulty with maintaining this filesystem. Although they might be fixed in newer versions, the current status remains unclear to me. Additionally, the performance behaviour (e.g. when deleting many files) is different from other file systems and might be unexpected/unwanted.
ZFS: If it were as easily available as the other kernel-integrated file systems, I'd definitely vote for ZFS. Although I percieved it as complex in the past, after two hours of experimentation in a VM, it did not seem more complex than the ext4+mdadm variant which I am using as of now. I can confirm that ZFS needs some RAM: For me it was much more than the 1 GiB/TiB which I had read before, but then again I had a special use case with many small files. Other points which I repeatedly see in ZFS discussions (without knowing their validity whatsoever):
* ZFS making good use of RAM means non-ECC-RAM can enlarge the chance of data corruption. * ZFS being a server filesystem means power outrages are not handled well.These are all points which do not drive me away. My reason for not using ZFS is simply: It is not integrated into the Linux kernel. Upon every kernel update, there is a `dkms`-step involved and if it fails, the system will fail to boot. I have used (and am using) various other non-standard kernel modules (historically: VirtualBox and OSS4; now: NVidia graphics drivers) and each of them has failed upon an update at least once. As all of them (VMs, sound, graphics) are rather on the "optional" side of features, I can live with that... but I would not trust my files to such a "random source of failure" :)
Another interesting question for a file server: What protocol are you going to use for the actual file-serving? See also on the RAID levels: https://www.baarf.dk/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt HTH Linux-Fan [...]
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