Pete90
Thank you so much for this explanation. I am just a beginner, so those horror stories did scare me a bit. I also read, that you can fine tune ZFS to prevent write amplification so I’ll read into that subject a bit more.
I thought ZFS without redundancy did give no benefits, but I most have gotten that wrong. Thanks again!
Yeah, concering TBW there wasn’t a huge difference between cosumer- and enterprise drives that I saw. Something along 2500TBW vs. 3500TBW (unless you go with those unaffordable drives, then yes). I’ll monitor the drives and if I find rapidly increasing wear, I can still switch to another file system. The whole reason I bought the Lenovo is to setup a second machine and experiment, while I still have a running “production” system. Thank you!
That rabbit hole is interesting, but also deep and scary. I’m trying to challenge myself by setting up Proxmox, as so far I’ve just used Raspbery Pis as well as OpenMediaVault. So when I saw those stories about drives dying after 6 months, I was a bit concerned;. Especially because I can’t yet verify the truth in those storries, since I’d call myself and advanced novice if I’, being generous.
I’ll track drive usage and wear and see what my system does. Good point, then I can get rid of the guesswork. Thank you a lot!
I’m currently playing around in VMs even before I order my hard drives. Just to see, what I can do. Next up is to simulate a root drive failure and how to replace that. I also want to test rolling back from snapshots.
The data that I really do need and can’t replace is redundant anyway: one copy on my PC, one on my external HDD, one on my NAS and one on a system at my sisters place. Thats 4 copies on several media (one cold) and at another place. :)
I barely scratched the surface with ZFS, so I’m not going to touch another file system for a while now. I’m fine with detecting data corruption only, since those files (on the static data storage) can be replaced easily and hold no real value for me. All other data will be either on the redundant pool or is saved to several other media and even one off-site copy.
I already wrote down ashift=12 in my notes for when I set it up.
In general, I found there is a lot of FUD out there when it comes to data security. One I liked a lot was ECC RAM being mandatory for ZFS. Then one of the creators of it basically said: "Nah, it’s not needed more than for any other file system’.
I’m currently using this guide to setup a OPNsense VM on proxmox. Home Network Guy also has an OPNsense guide, but for a full router.