<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">Thanks for the reply.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I just read on many different places on the net that single disk zpool was not</div><div class="">a wise choice..</div><div class="">for an example : </div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><font face="Monaco" class=""><span style="font-size: 11px;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class="">"single disk ZFS is so pointless it's actually worse than not using ZFS".</span><br style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class=""><br style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class=""><span style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class="">Technically you can do deduplication and compression.</span><br style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class=""><br style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class=""><span style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class="">But there is no protection from corruption since there is no redundancy. So any error can be detected, but cannot be corrected. This sounds like an acceptable compromise, but its actually not. The reason its not is that ZFS' metadata cannot be allowed to be corrupted. If it is it is likely the zpool will be impossible to mount (and will probably crash the system once the corruption is found). So a couple of bad sectors in the right place will mean that all data on the zpool will be lost. Not some, all. Also there's no ZFS recovery tools, so you cannot recover any data on the drives. You cannot use the standard recovery tools that are designed for NTFS, FAT32, etc either. They don't work correctly.</span><br style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class=""><br style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class=""><span style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class="">So what does all of this mean? It means that you run the risk of everything being just fine, and then suddenly (and without warning) all of the data is irretrievably lost.</span><br style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class=""><br style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class=""><span style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class="">This is obviously much worse than using something like NTFS which, when faced with corruption, will simply delete the offending entries (so some data will be lost, but not necessarily everything). You can also do some amount of recovery with things like chkdsk (no equivalent exists in the ZFS world). You can also use some recovery tools that exist if things get really bad (no equivalent exists in the ZFS world).</span><br style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class=""><br style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class=""><span style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class="">So can you do what you want? Yep. But doing it is worse than simply using NTFS or whatever "legacy" file system you choose. I could easily argue that if your data is that unimportant you should simply delete it.</span></span></font></div><div class=""><font face="Monaco" class=""><span style="font-size: 11px;" class=""><span style="color: rgb(20, 20, 20); font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2; background-color: rgb(248, 248, 248);" class=""><br class=""></span></span></font></div><div class=""><div class="">Just wanted to double check the people opinions on this matter.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div><br class=""> <br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On 12 Jul 2017, at 10:10, Peter Tribble <<a href="mailto:peter.tribble@gmail.com" class="">peter.tribble@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><br class=""><div class="gmail_extra"><br class=""><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 10:56 AM, Svavar Örn Eysteinsson <span dir="ltr" class=""><<a href="mailto:svavar@pipar-tbwa.is" target="_blank" class="">svavar@pipar-tbwa.is</a>></span> wrote:<br class=""><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br class=""> Hello.<br class=""> <br class=""> I need to connect a single USB disk to my HP Microserver NL54 running OmniOS.<br class=""> Going to utilize it as a backup disk for some resources on my home LAN.<br class=""> The Microserver does have many USB ports that would be fine to utilize, as I have filled the 3.5" slots in the server<br class=""> in RAIDZ modes.<br class=""> <br class=""> The thing is, what options do I have as formating the disk? Is it only the ancient UFS and<br class=""> the FAT32 which is not going to do it's job because of file size limit ?<br class=""> <br class=""> And correct me if I'm wrong, ZFS on a single disk is not a nice job.<br class=""></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Why not?<br class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">ZFS is better than UFS or FAT. It'll tell you when your data is corrupted,<br class=""></div><div class="">which the others won't. If you want extra protection and have enough<br class="">space then set copies=2 (lose the space, but you get self-healing back).<br class=""></div><div class="">Do set LZ4 compression, there's no reason not to these days.<br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Just because you can't take advantage of all of the ZFS benefits doesn't<br class=""></div><div class="">immediately make it unsuitable, when the alternatives don't even have<br class=""></div><div class="">those features at all.<br class=""></div><div class=""> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> btw, I do have 16GB ECC memory on the HP Microserver.<br class=""> <br class=""> As OpenIndiana distro has the NTFS fuse modules available, but there isn't any available<br class=""> for OmniOS. Any reason why?<br class=""> <br class=""> So my options are what, UFS and FAT32 ?<br class=""></blockquote><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">ZFS. Although the one consideration for a backup drive is what you're<br class=""></div><div class="">going to connect it to. (Which again says ZFS, because you can then<br class=""></div><div class="">import the pool on another system pretty easily.)<br class=""></div><div class=""> <br class=""></div></div>-- <br class=""><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature">-Peter Tribble<br class=""><a href="http://www.petertribble.co.uk/" target="_blank" class="">http://www.petertribble.co.uk/</a> - <a href="http://ptribble.blogspot.com/" target="_blank" class="">http://ptribble.blogspot.com/</a></div> </div></div> </div></blockquote></div><br class=""></body></html>