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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.
[It is a long — and detailed — read with quite a few examples and their performance outcomes. Read the 2nd link above to get started and then continue with this story's linked article.--martyb]
Previously:
(2018-09-11) What is ZFS? Why are People Crazy About it?
(2017-07-16) ZFS Is the Best Filesystem (For Now)
(2017-06-24) Playing with ZFS (on Linux) Encryption
(2016-02-18) ZFS is Coming to Ubuntu LTS 16.04
(2016-01-13) The 'Hidden' Cost of Using ZFS for Your Home NAS
(Score: 2) by srobert on Thursday May 21 2020, @06:21PM (2 children)
It doesn't. There's a FreeBSD laptop on the kitchen table. It's got ZFS and only 4G Ram. My wife uses it for daily tasks. A single disk and not mirroring anything so under those circumstance one might ask, "what's the advantage over UFS?". I'm not sure there's an advantage, but after running that way for years, I can say there's no definitely no disadvantage.
(Score: 2, Informative) by DECbot on Thursday May 21 2020, @10:41PM (1 child)
The advantage is zfs send to do backups of her laptop--with encryption on both the dataset and the data in transfer. Also, if you do automatic snapshots before any software is installed, updated, or removed you could then always undo those mistakes with a quick reboot and rollback instead of hours of fixing a botched install, update, deletion, etc.
Performance, you could probably argue UFS is as performant or better, but the administration aspects of ZFS are superior.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @11:05PM
ZFS wins in performance too, even if benchmarks say differently. CoW, caching, etc. make ZFS perform very well as a desktop filesystem.