# Would ZFS be a good idea for a Media Server



## jjthomas (Oct 8, 2014)

I have a PC with 8GB of RAM running on an Intel Processor Duo Core (64bit). 

My configuration is as follows:

128 GB SSD for OS and website jail
2, 256GB drives as a RAID backup.
3 TB Seagate for storing video and audio recordings 
1 GB WD Green drive, file storage.

I'm running MythTV with two tuners.  I may increase that to four.  I will be running several low volume web sites with email, in a jail.  The webs sites are just simple blog sites.  

Would I benefit from using ZFS across all the drives?  It seems I would need to have about 5GB of RAM for the ZFS system.

Do I need ZFS for jails?

The feature I like about ZFS is the snapshot feature.

Reliability and up time are important.

-JJ


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## SirDice (Oct 8, 2014)

jjthomas said:
			
		

> Would I benefit from using ZFS across all the drives?  It seems I would need to have about 5 GB of RAM for the ZFS system.


That's a "rule of thumb", not a hard limit. My home server runs just fine with 4 GB of RAM and serving about 11 TB of ZFS storage ( 4 x 3 TB RAID-Z and 3 x 500 GB RAID-Z). Mostly movies, TV shows and the odd documents I have shared with Samba. Don't enable dedup though, that's going to kill the machine. Compression on the other hand should be fine at the expense of a little more CPU load. 


> Do I need ZFS for jails?


It's not a necessity but it makes working with jails a whole lot more fun. It's quite easy to set up a "base" jail and use `zfs clone` to make multiple copies in the blink of an eye.


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## jjthomas (Oct 12, 2014)

Thank you.  ZFS it is.  It took a little while to get everything moved around.  I did some "drive" cleaning as well.

Definitely no on dedup.  I don't have the RAM and I don't see where I would benefit from enabling it.

-JJ


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