My second experience using ZFS! (as intended!)

First experience

I was a complete newbie to ZFS, which I knew at the time. First of all:

  1. I was using a 4 bay …USB… enclosure (this is not recommended).
  2. I wasn’t using ECC ram, more important that most people think when using ZFS.
  3. Using consumer grade cheap ssd’s for my first pool (Lots of checksum errors and poor lifespan).
  4. Not really a mistake but I was using ZFS on ubuntu server
  5. No S.M.A.R.T notifications or even ZFS notifications :O scary…

Now to the present!

I will continue to use ZFS for the foreseeable future, that is because I have fixed all of my mistakes and learnt a lot from them. I hope that sharing my mistakes will help some of you out there new to homelabbing or selfhosting in general.

My setup now consists of a new server that does have ECC compatibility, I have checked everything and ECC is correctly setup and fully working. The pool of SSD’s got replaced with a pool of Seagate Ironwolf HDD’s.

Small rant about WD

I chose Seagate instead of WD because of lower price and supposed longer lifespan, and WD has had more “scandals” (for lack of a better word) that I would like, like the 3 year “replace me” errors on synology’s NASes or the past SMR screw up with their “NAS” drives.

I also repurposed the usb disks enclosure and now I have my disks plugged in directly to the server through sata.

New OS

Instead of ubuntu server’s ZFS I am now using TrueNAS Core… Virtualized on Proxmox, yea, that’s not controversial at all! I just hope it doesn’t backfire at me. Some people swear by only using TrueNAS baremetal and ditching proxmox for this kind of setup, but I have choice and that is what I chose, and runs great.

NFS

On my server I now have a TrueNAS VM and a NixOS vm that hosts docker stuff, that connects through NFS to the TrueNAS VM. This setup works well for me, but I do not know if it is or not a mistake currently. I like having TrueNAS for the ease of use, notifications, cool graphs, etc. It didn’t make sense to “host” my ZFS pool on the NixOS vm because I have other small servers connect to it, and I don’t want downtime on NixOS causing those to “go down” too.

Conclusion

I am still learning a lot and I am still a newbie for sure, but I feel like I am making progress and that’s all that matters right?. I hope you enjoyed my post, and if by chance you found it through a search engine, when diagnosing hundreds of cheksum errors or something like that, like me in the past, then I hope my little experience helped you out, also just a reminder:

ZFS is NOT a backup, have proper backups!