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I just found out that the ZFS community on Reddit moved here. (I totally sympathize).
I have been using ZFS for a few years now as a backup for my family’s computer after one of my external USB disk drives that I was using as a makeshift backup had failed. I setup an inexpensive RAID-Z, I bought a SATA backplane with proper drive bays, which attaches to my desktop computer via USB (it was all I could afford).
For the most part, I think I understand how ZFS works, at least, from the perspective of an operator. But I would prefer to have a place where I can consult with others if I run into trouble.
Really glad to find this place. I can’t thank @mercenary_sysadmin enough for taking the time to chat with me a bit on The Social Network Formerly Known as Twitter and point me here.
I’m old school enough to really miss the era of forums and Usenet, so I’m really glad to see a community like this–especially one that’s welcoming to those of us not in the industry who just want to get started with and use our ZFS-based systems to do actual work outside of the hardcore enterprise environment.
I’m also looking forward to having a place to come to ask questions about current ZFS issues. ZFS has been around so long that it can be a challenge to google answers to questions since you end up surfacing an entire page of hits from 10+ years ago that are thoroughly outdated. Or, you’ll tend to find newer results that assume that you’re in a datacenter with vastly more testing and production resources than I have at my disposal.
I got into ZFS without really intending to. I wanted to use Proxmox VE for my first home office virtualization server, and after reading up on things, it was clear that Proxmox prefers to use a ZFS-backed filesystem. The ext4 mode is well documented, but several of the more interesting Proxmox features require ZFS for snapshots/replication/etc
So, I decided (naively) to try to teach myself Proxmox and ZFS at the same time. Or rather: Proxmox, ZFS, and Proxmox’s sometimes odd implementation of various ZFS features. Somehow, I wound up with a functional Proxmox node at the end of things … and plans for two TrueNAS installs.
On the other hand, after understanding ZFS in Proxmox well enough to be confident in my setup, I rolled on trying to set up TrueNAS SCALE with the expectation it was going to be another … fun experience … and then it all just worked automatically. Aside from adjusting recordsize, I haven’t had to worry about ZFS at all (yet), and I only have to go into a CLI to check my compression ratio.
You were certainly nicer in your commentary than the person to whom I mentioned that Proxmox locks the ARC cache size to 10 percent of memory because, officially, Proxmox is “not a storage server.”
Sounds odd. I have been running proxmox for several years now and it always had 50% max arc size as default. Is this something that has changed very recently? I currently have 70% of ram set as max arc in my home setup as I do not need that much memory for the virtualization workloads and I’m also using the same server as a bulk storage system (simple smb server and sharing zvols over iscsi).
Introduce yourself by adding your picture and information about yourself and your interests to your profile. What is one thing you’d like to be asked about?
Get to know the community by browsing discussions that are already happening here. When you find a post interesting, informative, or entertaining, use the 
to show your appreciation or support!
Contribute by commenting, sharing your own perspective, asking questions, or offering feedback in the discussion. Before replying or starting new topics, please review the Community Guidelines.
