ZFS versus RAID: Eight Ironwolf disks, two filesystems, one winner

'This has been a long while in the making—it's test results time. To truly understand the fundamentals of computer storage, it's important to explore the impact of various conventional RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) topologies on performance. It's also important to understand what ZFS is and how it works. But at some point, people (particularly computer enthusiasts on the Internet) want numbers. First, a quick note: This testing, naturally, builds on those fundamentals. We're going to draw heavily on lessons learned as we explore ZFS topologies here. If you aren't yet entirely solid on the difference between pools and vdevs or what ashift and recordsize mean, we strongly recommend you revisit those explainers before diving into testing and results. And although everybody loves to see raw numbers, we urge an additional focus on how these figures relate to one another. All of our charts relate the performance of ZFS pool topologies at sizes from two to eight disks to the performance of a single disk. If you change the model of disk, your raw numbers will change accordingly—but for the most part, their relation to a single disk's performance will not.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/zfs-versus-raid-eight-ironwolf-disks... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

On Tue, 19 May 2020 09:29:11 +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote:
-- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/05/zfs-versus-raid-eight-ironwolf-disks...
Interestingly, I couldn’t see any comparison of resource usage. Because ZFS has a reputation as a CPU and memory hog, while Linux software RAID seems to need very little of this. In short, ZFS is probably best deployed on a dedicated storage server, rather than a machine which is shared with other workloads.
participants (2)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro
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Peter Reutemann