Benchmarking OpenZFS vs. EXT4 for My NAS

heitorpb.github.io

4 pointshpb423 comments

I didn't see in the post, but have you considered also Btrfs if you are on Linux?

Currently, I use Btrfs on Synology, mainly because snapshots and checksums are nice, but I never really did the work to do benchmarks against other FS. In the past my choice was Ext4 or XFS with LUKS/LVM, then Btrfs matured and since then I moved to it. So far I had no issues, but YMMV, some people consider it still not entirely reliable, but I do backups. I'm setting up a FreeBSD server where ZFS was the natural choice, again snapshots, boot environments, native encryption and just maturity/reliability. I haven't considered OpenZFS yet, mainly because my Synology does not support it, but your benchmarks have some interesting numbers, when I'll have again enough money for some new HDDs I may give it a try.

+1 for btrfs

If a NAS has a 1G or even 2.5G NIC, improving the filesystem performance is a waste of time... the network is the bottleneck. My N100 two-disk btrfs-raid1 NAS hits line rate on a 2.5G NIC, that's all that matters to me.

I use ZFS on my laptops and desktop but kind of considered Btrfs for this new NAS. What made me decide to use ZFS instead is that Btrfs does not have [yet] transparent encryption, I'd need to use dm-crypt/LUKS. ZFS has that natively, so :shrug: When transparent encryption lands on Btrfs, I may consider it for new machines (or Bcachefs if it gets back in the Linux Kernel).

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