ZFS filesystem possible for NAS with Merlin?

[heysoundude]

Can I install ZFS on my router? I tried searching for this but couldn't come up with any indication one way or the other...
I'd rather have a bunch of smaller drives in case one should decide to die rather than one monstrous bitbin...like a bunch of 250 GB ones rather than one 3 TB potential point of failure.

 

[Dragon]

As I understand it, ZFS needs quite a lot of ram to operate efficiently. far more than any typical home router has.

 

[heysoundude]

I'm digging into the OpenZFS wiki and haven't found anything about host RAM requirements, but this ^ makes sense.

 

[taffeys]

I'm digging into the OpenZFS wiki and haven't found anything about host RAM requirements, but this ^ makes sense.

I run two servers that are based upon ZFS file systems; one has 32GB of ECC memory and the other has 64GB of ECC memory.

These routers would not be appropriate to use ZFS. Here is a summary of ZFS memory requirements. ZFS uses RAM in a few ways:

1) Read cache. This function is known as ARC. Estimate this at about 1 GB per TB of zpool.
2) Temporary Write cache. Incoming writes queue up here before being added to the ZFS Intent Log (ZIL), and then ultimately to the live filesystem. This is generally only 200-500 MB, but estimate at least 1 GB.
3) Checksums: ZFS performs checksumming on all blocks of data stored within the zpool, and those checksums have to be calculated and verified for each read and write. These operations use considerable CPU and RAM. Difficult to estimate.
4) Parity-Data: If your drives are in a RAID-Z configuration, then ZFS uses RAM during the calculation of Parity Data which allows the fault-tolerance offered by RAID-Z. Calculating parity data uses considerable CPU and RAM, and must be done in addition to the standard checksum operations. Difficult to estimate.

 

[heysoundude]

wow and woah. Thank you.