Re:ZFS: Use mirror vdevs, not RAIDZ
by mindslight on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @05:13PM
(#25365996)
This is true in a vacuum, but I feel it misses the mark having run my own personal array for 20+ years. For the most part, individuals have very little mission critical data (unless they're videographers or professional photographers). Ergo, most data on personal arrays is going to be non-critical - eg VM images, old drive images, build trees, downloaded datasets, torrented media.
Does it make sense to double your cost (/halve your capacity) by backing up the whole thing, especially when the backup is likely to be more spinning rust? I've recently chosen to do so (while also backing up the critical data several different ways), but haven't always. I can understand people who still choose otherwise. Either way my main concern is a single raidz3 and I'm going to have a bad week if I lose that, independent of what can be rebuilt.
In general, personal users of ZFS are very different than institutional users of ZFS. Hopefully not too divergent, so those raidz code paths still receive lots of testing and support. But you need to always keep this in mind when reading any advice about ZFS.
Does it make sense to double your cost (/halve your capacity) by backing up the whole thing, especially when the backup is likely to be more spinning rust? I've recently chosen to do so (while also backing up the critical data several different ways), but haven't always. I can understand people who still choose otherwise. Either way my main concern is a single raidz3 and I'm going to have a bad week if I lose that, independent of what can be rebuilt.
In general, personal users of ZFS are very different than institutional users of ZFS. Hopefully not too divergent, so those raidz code paths still receive lots of testing and support. But you need to always keep this in mind when reading any advice about ZFS.