Re: [gentoo-user] Good/better/best filesystem for large, static video library?

[Michael Hampicke <gentoo-user@hadt.biz>]

Am 27.12.2012 01:18, schrieb Alan McKinnon:
> On Tue, 25 Dec 2012 07:41:01 -0800
> Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi,
>>    Merry Christmas to all.
>>
>>    Upgrading an external USB2 drive at home this Christmas morning to
>> 1TB for more video storage space. One large partition, non-raid, files
>> are around 1GB. The drive holds only static video files that get
>> written once and don't change or get erased. No MythTV stuff or
>> anything like that.
>>
>>    This disk reside on my main desktop machine and gets backed up
>> every couple of days to another USB2 drive (FAT formatted
>> unfortunately) which attaches to the TV.
>>
>>    With the previous local drive I used ext3 and have had no problems.
>> I'm just wondering if there's a better choice & why.
> 
> 
> I am *very* impressed with ZFS for this. Yes, I know, it's not really
> there on Linux - I use it on FreeBSD (FreeNAS).
> 
> It has everything I've wanted in a filesystem for a long time, and all
> the crap I've stuffed into my head over many years related to storage
> just goes away. It doesn't go to some place I don't have to deal with
> it, it just ceases to exist. Very nice.
> 
> There is no more weird partitions from the days of DOS, no PV/VG/LV to
> remember the details of. There is only storage and ZFS knows what I
> want to happen with each "chunk" of it. A "chunk" (my term) in this
> context is a directory and everything below it.
> 
> ZFS doesn't have partitions and filesystems. It has volumes. A volume
> is sort of a cross between a filesystem (you mount it and can assign
> quotas to it) and a directory (you assign permissions and ownerships to
> it). You can overcommit storage space and quotas - you do not get "disk
> full" errors and three days of nightmares while you figure out how to
> deal with this. the FS just tells you it used more than the allocated
> space and keeps telling you till you get it under the limit.
> 
> mv'ing a few TB of video to a different FS to free up space is not fun
> at all, but with ZFS it's like an mv on the same FS (that volume thing
> again). It checksums every write and lets you know if things fail. It
> has proper snapshots built in - that's proper as in copy-on-write so
> they don't really take up space until you start modifying files. Your
> media collection is like mine - I only add to it and seldom delete, so
> I have months of snapshots that consume about 1% extras space. Dale's
> rm problem cannot happen to me anymore hehehehe ;-)
> 
> In summary, it does everything I want and does it well. It can also do
> other things I don't want but others might (eg de-dupe).
> 
> 

I am a big fan of zfs myself. I use zfsonlinx on my workstation (only
/usr/portage and /usr/src atm, but with on-the-fly compression, very
nice on my small SSD). Unfortunately the zfs implementation is a few
large steps behind zfs on *bsd

Migrating my NAS to ZFS is something that has been floating around my
head for a longer time. But I am not really sure if I want to switch
from gentoo to FreeBSD on my NAS. zfsonlinux is there, but it's first
release was early 2011, so it's still pretty young. I guess for the time
being I stick to an old credo: never touch a running system