Mark Knecht wrote: > > > On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 12:10 PM Wol > wrote: > > > Do you want the system layered, with each layer doing one job? Use > > dm-integrity to protect against corruption, raid to join the disks, lvm > > to partition them, and ext to manage the directories and files. > > > > I do the latter ... > > No argument there, at least on a group of drives where you  > want to have flexibility in the future. Desktop computers or > system drives certainly. You didn't tell me what replaces > the compression aspect of the problem but I'm sure there's > something. It's a great strategy if you have the expertise and > time to set it up and then manage it when a problem arises, > if it ever arises.  > > I'm just asking what's the purpose of doing LVM, or your > suggested layering, specifically on a storage pool for a  > home user like Dale? That's the part I don't understand,  > especially for a new NAS user like Dale? > > Mark > > > My reasoning is simple, I'm already familiar with LVM and how to manage it.  While I swap drives on my Gentoo rig pretty regular lately, I don't want to be limited from doing that on a NAS either.  If for example I want to replace a 10TB drive with a 16TB drive, LVM makes that easy and I know how to do it already.  With ZFS tho, is that even doable and if it is, do I want to learn to do it with a new tool?  From what I've seen, I'm not even sure you can do that.  It seems you can expand by adding a drive but not replace or shrink.  As a example.  I went back to a basic pool of two drives.  I then recreated a dataset, or whatever it is called, and added for it to be encrypted.  Since I did that, I get write errors.  I can mount it just fine but that's it.  I have no idea what the cause is, google isn't helping and to be honest, I'm thinking about target practice for the thing.  It took me a good long while to set up the most basic thing.  Adding encryption shouldn't be hard but apparently, it is more difficult than I thought.  That or its so secure even I can't use it even with the password.  lol  This is what I like about LVM and cryptsetup.  I create a partition, or use a whole drive, as needed.  I use cryptsetup to start the process with one drive.  I then put ext4 on top of that.  Then I add a second drive to that pv, add that to the volume group, extend the file system, all done.  And it is encrypted as well.  If I need to move from one drive to say a larger drive, no problem.  Add drive, move data, remove old drive, extend file system if needed, all done.  I have notes but I've done it a lot recently and have the general idea still glued to the back of my head.  ;-)  Thing is, ZFS isn't making sense to me so I'm clueless where to start when something goes wrong or even getting it to work period.  I may try watching a video on ZFS and see if that helps.  Maybe it will, maybe I'll still prefer LVM.  After all, I'm a old dog.  New tricks ain't easy.  ROFL  If I bought a pre-made NAS, I'd just have to deal with it.  I'd keep hammering until I got it to where I could backup my data.  If I build a Raspberry thing, NAS software may not be my first choice.  Maybe, just maybe, my light bulb will pop on and I can make sense of TrueNAS and ZFS.  If so, fine.  Right now, it's a lot of work with really no gain.  I'm not able to backup my data yet.  It's a brick, time consuming and confusing brick at that.  After supper, I'm rebooting and see if I can beat some sense into again.  Seriously considering using dd and starting over from scratch.  I can't figure out how to do that with the GUI thing.  No delete button, that I can find anyway.  Dale :-)  :-)