Retrogaming ROM Archive Storage on ZFS: zVol (Block Storage) vs Dataset?

OpenZFS
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Probably overthinking this a bit, but I made myself curious enough to ask. :slight_smile:

I’ve got a MiSTer FPGA and am looking forward to reliving my childhood gaming experience, but with more arthritis and more easily strained eyeballs. :wink:

I’m going to be storing my archive of the games I own on my NAS, and I’ve got two options: NFS or NVME over TCP via a zVol on the NAS.

Since this is a harmless thing to experiment with, and the load is primarily read-only once the data is stored, I was going to try it with a 64k volblocksize zVol as backing storage for an NVME over TCP share. I’ve never used this protocol before and won’t be mad if it goes terribly.

But, like, NES ROM files are tiny (e.g., 8k to 1 MB). In the real world, what are the ramifications of possible write-amplification of putting them on a zVol with 64k volblocksize?

Maybe this isn’t something I actually need to worry about?

(I can do NFS with a dataset just as easily. This is entirely motivated by wanting to experiment with NVME over TCP.)

2 Likes
2

You’re not going to be able to detect storage performance problems with the described workload. There’s just not enough storage workload to stress, well, much of anything.

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Thanks. :slight_smile:

I didn’t think so, but I’m wary of doing something stupid because I don’t know what I’m doing. :slight_smile:

Also, if I noticed performance issues, I wanted to be sure it wasn’t ZFS, since I’m also testing NVME over TCP.