[mythtv-users] ZFS anyone? Need to move off ZFS Myth machine and not sure what to do..

[Raymond Wagner]

On 10/13/2011 16:32, Brian J. Murrell wrote:
> On 11-10-13 04:24 PM, Richard Shaw wrote:
>> I guess my first question is do you really need ZFS for your MythTV
>> implementation? Don't get me wrong, it's a great file system with a
>> lot of neat features, but do you need it?

No, not really.  For independent recording disks, you're likely just as 
well off using a normal filesystem.  For your OS disk, it opens up a lot 
of options for ease of management.

> Indeed.  You certainly don't want to aggregate disks with ZFS (or
> anything else for that matter) as Mythtv will take advantage of the
> spindle bandwidth of individual disks itself (i.e. putting two
> simultaneous recordings onto two different disks).

That's not entirely true.  In ZFS, you start out with a zpool.  Each 
zpool can have multiple vdevs, and each vdev can have multiple devices.  
Your zvols (partitions) are then created out of the cumulative storage 
of the zpool.  Each vdev operates as one unit, striped, mirrored, or 
paritied.  Multiple vdevs in a zpool will operate completely 
independently, allowing ZFS to automatically balance files between them 
in much the same manner as MythTV does.