storage wars

storage wars

i’m currently running an unRaid server, which hosts my media collection  (movies, tv series, music, pictures and data backups)

but, i’m running out of space on the server (currently 31.69TB used out of 32.51TB available)

so i started looking for options on how to expand my capacity and decided on adding a second unRaid server, virtualizing both unRaids in an ESXi 5 head server and putting the disks on two DAS boxes (discussions at two unraid servers, atlas: a virtualized unraid, building a jbod das

at some point during that span of time, zfs came up. i researched as much as i could and finally found this enlightening thread: Freenas vs unRaid.

my take on this whole storage wars is that each solution has its merits and my plan changed slightly

  • continue with the virtualized + das boxes unraid setup
  • add a virtualized zfs implementation to backup my osx data

the idea is that unRaid is much better suited to hold an expanding media collection, where i can add drives when needed and keep having one parity disk to protect the array. under zfs, every drive (or more precisely every vdev) would hit me with a parity space penalty

in my next posts, i will write down my zfs test scenario, while i wait for the parts of my all-encompassing ESXi build

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