Mama told me not to come.
She said, that ain’t the way to have fun.
Disagree. There should be a few more questions as well:
Look beyond initial setup and think about what happens after a couple years.
Yup, I used to use LVM, but the two big NAS filesystems have a ton of nice features and they expect to control the disk management. I looked into BTRFS and ZFS, and since BTRFS is native to Linux (some of my SW doesn’t support BSD) and I don’t need anything other than RAID mirror, that’s what I picked.
I used LVM at work for simple RAID 0 systems where long term uptime was crucial and hardware swaps wouldn’t likely happen (these were treated like IOT devices), and snapshots weren’t important. It works well. But if you want extra features (file-level snapshots, compression, volume quotas, etc), BTRFS and ZFS make that way easier.
ZFS really likes RAM, so if you’re running anything less than 16GB, that could be your issue.
I doubt that. Some options:
The list is endless. Maybe BTRFS is more tolerant of the problems you’re facing, but that doesn’t mean the problems are specific to ZFS. I recommend doing a bit of testing to see if everything looks fine on the HW side of things (memtest, smart tests, etc).
btrfs doesn’t provide me with any advantages that I don’t already have at a lower level.
Well yeah, because it’s supposed to replace those lower levels.
Also, BTRFS does provide advantages over ext4, such as snapshots, which I think are fantastic since I can recover if things go sideways. I don’t know what your use-case is, so I don’t know if the features BTRFS provides would be valuable to you.
Power costs would have to be bonkers for it to matter.
8TB NAS HDDs are <$200, so even if it uses 15W vs 3W, that’s 12W difference, or 8-9kWh/month. If you pay a ridiculous $0.40/kWh, that’s $40/year. That means the SSDs would pay for themselves after ~15 years, and I’m guessing you’d replace/upgrade them long before then.
But NAS drives use a lot less than 15W, usually around 4-6W idle. So the payoff period is probably closer to 30 years… My electricity is more like 0.12-15/kWh, so it’s never going to pay back for itself.
My problem is what happens if my internet goes down when there’s an important email or something. I suppose I could run it on a VPS just in case, but that’s still not as reliable as an email service, nor is it necessarily cheaper.
So I pay for Tuta email. It’s €3/month, supports my custom domains, and generally works pretty well. My VPS costs €4.5/month, and I may get rid of it once my city finishes rolling out fiber because I only need it due to CGNAT. Neither is particularly expensive, but Tuta is really good value for what I get. If my family members want to join, costs will go up (€3/user), so I may consider switching if that happens.