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tldr: I’m going to set up raid z2 with 4x8TB hard drives. I’ll have photos, documents (text, pdf, etc.), movies/tv shows, and music on the pool. Are the below commands good enough? Anything extra you think I should add?

sudo zpool create mypool raidz2 -o ashift=12 /dev/disk/by-id/12345 ...

zfs set compression=lz4 mypool #maybe zstd?
zpool set autoexpand=on mypool
zpool set autoreplace=on mypool
zpool set listsnapshots=on mypool

With ai raising hard drive prices, I over spent on 3x10TB drives in order to reorganize my current pool and have 3 hard drives sitting on a shelf in the event of a failure. My current pool was built over time but it currently consists of 4x8TB drives. They are a mirrored stripe so a usable 16TB. If I understand it correctly, I can lose 1 drive for sure without losing data and maybe a second drive depending on which drive fails. Because of that, I want to move to raid z2 to ensure I can lose 2 drives without data loss. I’m going to move data from my 4x8TB drives, to the 3x10TB, reconfigure the 4x8TB, and move everything back. I run Immich, plex/jellyfin, and navidrome off the pool. All other documents are basically there for storage just in case. What options should I use for raid z2 when setting it up?

Make sure you scrub weekly. The probability of a second device failure is higher than you think, since it can be triggered by resilvering. I would also make sure you have a spare at hand.

For context, I’ve also been using ZFS since Solaris.

I was wrong about compression on datasets vs pools, my apologies.

By “almost no impact” (for compression), I meant well under 1% penalty for zstd, and almost unmeasurable for lz4 fast, with compression efficiency being roughly the same for both lz4 and zstd. Here is some data on that.

Lz4 compression on modern (post-haswell) CPUs is actually so fast, that lz4 can beat non-compressed writes in some workloads (see this). And that is from 2015.

Today, there is no reason to turn off compression.

I will definitely look into the NFS integrations for ZFS, I use NFS (exports and mounts) extensively, I wonder what I’ve been missing.

Anyway, thanks for this.

I was scared off a couple years ago when I attempted to host it myself. I took a break from selfhosting, but now I’m back, and from what I learned in the past, I know now not to torture myself swimming upstream when there are far easier downstream currents to follow.

I’m looking at conduit but I’m currently writing up a doc to plan out the process, and understand it before I actually deploy anything. I don’t want to open ports, don’t need federation and don’t need encryption, since I’ll be using tailscale to host a private server to only members of my tailnet.

I’ll report back, either here or in the main community, because I don’t want to expose ports, rent a VPS or use ansible for a simple private server for less than 10 people.