OPENZFS HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS UPDATE
OPENZFS HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS WINDOWS 8
OPENZFS HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS FREE
OPENZFS HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS WINDOWS

You won’t get the performance that a ZFS RAID-Z with sufficient ram would offer, but you probably don’t need that kind of performance for a home file server anyway.

OPENZFS HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS WINDOWS

If you don’t have the budget for that much ram, Windows Storage Spaces is probably a better choice for you. The FreeBSD wiki recommends at least 1GB of ram per TB of storage. While Microsoft neglects to mention any specific memory requirements to use Storage Spaces, ZFS is notorious for needing a lot of memory.

OPENZFS HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS UPDATE

Update - Microsoft has announced that it will be deprecating the ability to create ReFS pools in all Windows editions except for Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Pro for Workstations.

OPENZFS HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS FREE

If I had to pick one, it would again be ZFS because Linux is free and installable on almost any hardware. It is also extremely trivial to move an existing Storage Spaces pool to another Windows machine that supports it. The majority of pre-built computers come with Windows 10 Home already installed, so chances are good that your computer supports Storage Spaces.

OPENZFS HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS WINDOWS 8

Windows Storage Spaces is available on Windows 8 (Home and Pro) and above and on Windows Server 2012 and above. It is fairly trivial to move an existing ZFS pool to a different machine that supports ZFS. ZFS is supported on a variety of operating systems including Linux, which is free and can be installed on almost any computer. You can schedule hardware healthchecks and backups, but neither of those are as straightforward to configure on Windows as they are on Linux. There are multiple reports of this interfering with performance in the rest of your applications. On the other hand, with Windows Storage Spaces, you have no control over when the ReFS scrubs occur.

emailing yourself the results of each of those tests.

regularly running storage hardware health checks.

There are some really useful things you can automate if you’re using ZFS and Linux. As long as Windows Storage Spaces and ReFS remain closed source, it won’t be easy for 3rd party application developers to build support or recovery tools for it. If you are having any issues or needing to recover a failed drive, you’ll be much more able to find instructions and tools for ZFS than for Windows. Because of that there is a great support community for it. One of the major pros to using ZFS on Linux is that it is open source. Let’s compare the pros and cons of ZFS and Windows Storage Spaces across a few different categories that would be important to an average user. Windows Storage Spaces is the successor to Drive Extender, and adds a lot of useful functionality to it.

Windows Home Server was never a particularly popular product, and they eventually cancelled both products. Drive Extender basically allowed you to combine multiple hard drives into a single logical mounting point. Microsoft previously had a product called Windows Home Server, which had something called Drive Extender. Finally, in April 2016, ZFS on Linux was considered stable enough that it began to be included in default installations of Ubuntu. One of its major efforts included porting ZFS to Linux in a project called ZFS on Linux.

In 2013 OpenZFS was announced as the open source successor to ZFS. In 2010 Sun Microsystems was aquired by Oracle, and they decided to make their future development on ZFS closed source. It was made open source in 2005 with the OpenSolaris project. ZFS originally started as a Sun Microsystems project for their operating system Solaris. Using ECC ram has been shown to almost entirely eliminate these errors. The Oracle blog has a fantastic post on this topic. This can cause problems at all levels of your system and can negate many of the benefits of ZFS and ReFS. If you have 16gb of ram on your file server, that means you’re likely to experience random bits flipping 4 times every day. It is estimated that computers experience 1 random bit flip per 4gb of ram per day. Regardless of what file system you’re using, if you care about data integrity, you want to be using ECC ram. I’ll dive into some of the strengths and weaknesses of two file systems that actively prevent data decay-ZFS and ReFS. Luckily, there are some options to protect yourself from it.

I’m a bit paranoid when it comes to my data (family pictures and videos, legal documents, etc), so I’m not okay with my stuff being susceptible to data decay.

Openzfs hardware requirements