So I finally bit the bullet and decided to scrap ext4 for zfs. Played around with a VM before doing the real deal.
I couldn’t find a single guide for what I was looking for and used a handful of other sites/guides to piece it all together. Wondering if my setup is okay or flat out insane. A little confusing mixing guides
This is my setup & datasets (& zvol)
$ zpool status
pool: rpool
state: ONLINE
scan: scrub repaired 0B in 00:03:18 with 0 errors on Sat Aug 5 01:59:26 2023
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
rpool ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-Samsung_SSD_860_EVO_500GB_S3Y1CC0IA58810B-part2 ONLINE 0 0 0
ata-Samsung_SSD_870_EVO_500GB_S7PXMTEO510313X-part2 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
$ zfs list
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
rpool 228G 222G 96K none
rpool/ROOT 7.78G 222G 96K none
rpool/ROOT/archlinux 7.78G 222G 7.48G /
rpool/ROOT/archlinux@Aug6_2023 315M - 7.34G -
rpool/ext4 200G 337G 84.4G -
rpool/home 20.0G 222G 20.0G /home
rpool/home@Aug7 43.5M - 19.9G -
I’m using a mirror setup, with 2 x 500GB SSDs (Samsung 860 EVO + Samsung 870 EVO), created with ashift=12 (mixed search results using 13, drive lies @ 512b sectors)
Ig my question is, I do a fair bit of bittorrent and have several VMs. I created a ZVOL and created an ext4 filesystem on it. Would this eliminate the fragmentation that I would otherwise get if only using zfs? After some reading around, I set the zvolblocksize to 1M, all the other datasets are default (128k I believe)
I seem to be getting a pretty decent compressratio on the zvol @ 1.38x w/ LZ4 compression.
Is this the appropriate/correct usage of a ZVOL? Would it be an ideal way to store large files (and junk) that will be modified/created/destroyed semi-regularly, in terms of fragmentation (or any other issues)?
Overall things seem to be smooth, I created a tmpfs for my browser’s cache in RAM; I have VERY little to no write activity once I shifted the browser cache/profile @ /home/user/.cache/chromium
Thanks for any insights from anyone more experienced with zfs