SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
John Paul Wohlscheid over at It's FOSS takes a look at the ZFS file system and its capabilities. He mainly covers OpenZFS which is the fork made since Oracle bought and shut down Solaris which was the original host of ZFS. It features pooled storage with RAID-like capabilities, copy-on-write with snapshots, data integrity verification and automatic repair, and it can handle files up to 16 exabytes in size, with file systems of up to 256 quadrillion zettabytes in size should you have enough electricity to pull that off. Because it started development under a deliberately incompatible license, ZFS cannot be directly integrated in Linux. However, several distros work around that and provide packages for it. It has been ported to FreeBSD since 2008.
(Score: 1) by soylentnewsinator on Wednesday September 12 2018, @05:49AM
I skimmed through the article. You can grow your pool over time, but only as big as the smallest disk.
This underlines the fact that for a home user, your goal shouldn't be to have as big of a *pool* as possible, but rather, keep smaller pools.
For my home NAS, I'm moving to mirrored pools of only 2 disks and splitting up my data. If there's a catastrophic failure of a pool, I can use ddrescue on either drive. There is the added benefit of if you try to 'repair' a pool. If you imaged the entire pool (2 disks) and ran a repair that failed, you could restore them. Would you want to do this exercise with 10 drives in your pool? Probably not.