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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

Why is there a need to proselytize about ZFS in every thread on this topic?

It's almost entirely because people really like technology that not only promises to reward you with excellent features and stability, it follows through on those promises.

Because people don't know about cephfs yet, and the silliness of degraded raid setups. i.e. trusting a zfs community edition in a production environment can be a painful lesson. ;-)

I'm sure it'd be painful, but let's throw "infrequent" onto your description of the lesson. :-)

I've run ZFS for home storage and work backups for ~15 years, across Nexenta, ZFS-fuse, FreeBSD, and OpenZFS, backing up hundreds of machines, and have never lost data on one of them.

I know about CephFS, but performance was abysmal compared to ZFS for a home server. On a single box with 4-8 drives I didn't come close to saturating a 10G link, which ZFS managed just fine.

It was also very complex to manage compare to ZFS, with many different layers to consider.

I'm sure it shines in a data center, for which it has been designed. But unless something radical has changed in the last year, it's not for a budget homelab NAS.

The cephfs per-machine redundancy mode is usually the preferred configuration. i.e. usually avoids cramming everything into a single point of failure, buying specialty SAS cards, and poking at live raid arrays to do maintenance.

Seen too many people's TrueNAS/FreeNAS installs glitch up over the years to trust the zfs community edition as a sane production choice. ZFS certainly has improved, but Oracle is not generally known for their goodwill toward the opensource community. ;-)

I've never run TrueNAS/FreeNAS in proper production, but I have run it at home for over a decade and never lost data, despite generally running on old hardware, multiple drive failures, motherboards dying and power outages/lightning strikes.

Overall been very little fuzz for my home NAS system.

> Oracle

BTRFS seems to be maturing nicely, hopefully we can start using it for these types of workloads in the next few years.

BTRFS? you have to be joking... zfs despite its history, it has rarely achieved that level of silliness.

Because it works so well. At least that's why I talk about it.

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