I am in the process of making a DIY NAS box and I am debating between mdadm + BTRFS and ZFS. What are your experiences with using ZFS on Arch? Have you run into any major issues? Does ZFS being an external kernel module cause any annoyances with the frequent Arch kernel updates?

Give me the dirty details! Any recommendations or pitfalls I should avoid?

Thanks!

  • TedvdBEnglish
    3•2 years ago

    I’m using zfs on arch for a few years now.

    No issues with the filesystem at all!

    The only thing I’m noticing is that on some ocasions I can’t run updates if a new kernel has just came out; the arch repo doesn’t have the zfs modules for the new kernel yet. Usually a day later I can run updates without an issue.

    • @Molecular0079OPEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      That’s good to hear, thanks for sharing! Out of curiosity what kind of RAID and storage volume have you set up?

      • TedvdBEnglish
        2•2 years ago

        I’ve got a pool of a collection of harddisks, mirrored. Performance is pretty decent considering the slow disks.

        Oh having lots of available memory helps too, the ARC does a good job caching data, so the more the better.