High Sierra home directory on external ZFS Volume

New to OpenZFS on OS X (Or ZFS in general)? Ask your questions here!

High Sierra home directory on external ZFS Volume

Postby cactustweeter » Mon Feb 19, 2018 8:09 am

I just got a 2018 27" iMac. It's running High Sierra 10.13.3. It has a 1 TB APFS boot volume. I have an enclosure attached with 4 1 TB SSDs. I want to combine those 4 1 TB SSDs into a 4 TB volume and move my home directory onto that volume. Would OpenZFS be a suitable reliable solution? Has anyone on this forum done something similar?
cactustweeter
 
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2018 7:53 am

Re: High Sierra home directory on external ZFS Volume

Postby e8vww » Sat Feb 24, 2018 2:03 am

cactustweeter wrote:I just got a 2018 27" iMac. It's running High Sierra 10.13.3. It has a 1 TB APFS boot volume. I have an enclosure attached with 4 1 TB SSDs. I want to combine those 4 1 TB SSDs into a 4 TB volume and move my home directory onto that volume. Would OpenZFS be a suitable reliable solution? Has anyone on this forum done something similar?


From my experience, you'll probably wish you hadn't done it. I would use it for storage but not as a home/boot disk. There are too many issues with bottlenecking, the performance won't be good enough even with SSDs. One moment you will have good speeds and then for no obvious reason it will slow down to almost nothing or start spiking. You will probably encounter finder pauses. Use it as a "working drive" but not as a home/boot drive. Either way, please share your results!!
e8vww
 
Posts: 51
Joined: Fri Nov 24, 2017 2:06 pm

Re: High Sierra home directory on external ZFS Volume

Postby Brendon » Sun Feb 25, 2018 4:50 am

I have a homedir based on ZFS, with few issues. Have done so for a very long time. I'm obviously not as sensitive to performance issues as others!

And yes, for the record, I feel that we have lost performance in recent times.
Brendon
 
Posts: 286
Joined: Thu Mar 06, 2014 12:51 pm

Re: High Sierra home directory on external ZFS Volume

Postby cactustweeter » Sun Feb 25, 2018 9:00 am

Thank you e8vww & Brendon for your perspective. I think for now I will just go with Apple RAID. I will keep my eye on OpenZFS for possible adoption down the road.
cactustweeter
 
Posts: 4
Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2018 7:53 am


Return to Absolute Beginners Section

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 15 guests