Solved Reformatting NAS drive to UFS, but what FS for spare drive for FreeBSD from Linux?

Espionage724

Espionage724

I have a 10 TB SATA drive for a NAS and want it UFS for a bare-metal FreeBSD install. I plan to copy the contents of the drive (rsync/cp) over to another backup drive from Linux, installing FreeBSD, formatting the 10TB drive to UFS, mounting the spare drive, and then copying the spare drive's contents over to the UFS 10TB drive. The backup drive needs formatted.

I'm thinking ext4 on the spare drive would be best for FreeBSD? I'm thinking NTFS would be ideal so I can also mount the spare drive on Windows but not sure how NTFS is handled in FreeBSD. The spare drive just needs to be temporarily mountable in FreeBSD. I'm thinking something easy like GPT, single partition, and that partition ext4/NTFS/etc.
 
cracauer@ said:
Nah. ZFS is the portable filesystem now. Even Windows.
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Could I mount a ZFS partition/drive on Windows easy (like it just showing up as a drive in Computer/explorer)? I haven't messed with other filesystems on Windows in years but I recall needing a 3rd-party driver for ext3/4. I'd probably only use it under Windows 10 (21H2) or 11 (24H2+).
 
Espionage724 said:
Could I mount a ZFS partition/drive on Windows easy (like it just showing up as a drive in Computer/explorer)? I haven't messed with other filesystems on Windows in years but I recall needing a 3rd-party driver for ext3/4. I'd probably only use it under Windows 10 (21H2) or 11 (24H2+).
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I don't know. The ZFS port for Windows is brand new and I never tried it. It certainly integrates with the drive system.

It is reported as basically working. You could mount readonly if you are afraid of data corruption.
 
Is 8GB RAM (technically 7.75G) reasonable for ZFS on a 10TB drive, on a webserver?

I'm seeing 8GB recommended as a minimum for ZFS, but most discussions being about workstations and smaller drives. With nginx and php-fpm now on Linux my server is around 450MB RAM usage but I don't have a mysql server up currently (planning to use mariadb with mostly-defaults) My NAS usage is light (occasional video file streaming to set-top box)

I'm planning on installing FreeBSD, formatting the 10TB post-install to ZFS, then webserver stuff. I'm mainly curious on how ZFS's RAM usage scales, or if it'll do something like use GB chunks of RAM just if the drive was mounted?

FreeBSD by itself would be on a 120GB SSD, also ZFS if it's not pushing RAM too much.
 
cracauer@ said:
Should be fine if you don't turn dedup on.
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I did a quick search and ended up on a Solaris page that makes it sound like dedup can run continuously, or be done one-shot occasionally something like SSD trim? And that I wouldn't want to enable it continuously? I'll read more up on it a bit later but it sounds cool for my laptop.
 
Espionage724 said:
I did a quick search and ended up on a Solaris page that makes it sound like dedup can run continuously, or be done one-shot occasionally something like SSD trim? And that I wouldn't want to enable it continuously? I'll read more up on it a bit later but it sounds cool for my laptop.
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I don't know about Solaris but FreeBSD does not have one-shot dedup.
 
Espionage724 said:
I'm thinking NTFS would be ideal so I can also mount the spare drive on Windows but not sure how NTFS is handled in FreeBSD.
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If the drive was external (i.e., easily moved from one system to another), then your choice of FS would be more important.

If you have to remove the drive from an enclosure (e.g., NAS), then you've already resolved yourself to some level of hassle in order to use it "elsewhere".

Note that you not only have to consider if the FS is supported on all of the targets of interest to you, but you have to also make sure the applications on those targets will be able to handle the types of file/folder names that might be accommodated on the medium in its original "home".

E.g., I am always annoyed by Windows tools confusing the names Makefile, MAKEFILE and makefile IN THE SAME DIRECTORY - which is possible on a BSD box. Or, balking at names like class::method.

I.e., plan on where you MIGHT want to access the media and HOW as you go about making your decision.
 
This is going pretty well so far!

I formatted the spare drive as ext4 and it mounts on 14.2 with fusefs-ext2. I did a basic zpool create on the 10TB drive, and I'm doing rsync from the spare to the 10TB now.
 
cracauer@ said:
You know you can use ZFS on the external drive and share files between Linux and FreeBSD that way?
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I didn't want to figure out ZFS on Linux and figured ext4 was good enough for read :p

The rsync took about 8 hours but all looks good! vsftpd was pretty quick to set-up too. I wiped the 10TB drive and did zpool create 'NAS' '/dev/ada1' on it. Streaming with FTP with Kodi on Android TV currently with most of my webserver stuff running has RAM around 1008M/7.96G.

Was the ZFS format supposed to be that easy? I'm used to GPT/MBR, partition tables, fdisk, and mkfs on Linux, but zpool create had the drive ready for files after a single command.

Also is it as-easy as taking that drive as-is, connecting it to another FreeBSD computer, booting, and that drive show up under zfs commands?
 
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