Louwrentius

RAID 5 gets a lot of flak these days. You either run RAID 1, RAID 10 or you use RAID 6, but if you run RAID 5 you're told that you are a crazy person.

Using RAID 5 is portrayed as an unreasonable risk to the availability of your data. It is suggested that it is likely that you will lose your RAID array at some point.

That's an unfair representation of the actual risk that surrounds RAID 5. As I see it, the scare about RAID 5 is totally blown out of proportion.

I would argue that for small RAID arrays with a maximum of five to six drives, it's totally reasonable to use RAID 5 for your home NAS.

As far as I can tell, the campaign against RAID 5 mainly started with this article from zdnet.

As you know RAID 5 can tollerate a single drive failure. If a second drive dies and the first drive was not yet replaced or rebuild, you lose all contents of the array.

In the article the author argues that because drives become bigger but not more reliable, the risk of losing a second drive during a rebuild is so high that running RAID 5 is becoming risky.

You don't need a second drive failure for you to lose your data. A bad sector, also known as an Unrecoverable Read Error (URE), can also cause problems during a rebuild. Depending on the RAID implementation, you may lose some files or the entire array.

The author calculates and argues that the risk of such a bad sector or URE is so high with modern high-capacity drives, that this risk of a second drive failure during rebuild is almost unavoidable.

Most drives have a URE specification of 1 bit error in 12.5 TB of data (10^14). That number is used as an absolute, it's what drives do experience in our daily lives, but that's not true.

It's a worst-case number. You will see a read error in at-most 10^14 bits, but in practice drives are way more reliable.

I run ZFS on my 71 TB ZFS NAS and I scrub from time to time.

If that worst-case number were 'real', I would have caught some data errors by now. However, in line with my personal experience, ZFS hasn't corrected a single byte since the system came online a few years ago.

And I've performed so many scrubs that my system has read over a petabyte of data. No silent data corruption, no regular bad sectors.

It seems to me that all those risk aren't nearly as high as it seems.

I would argue that choosing RAID-5/Z in the right circumstances is reasonable. RAID-6 is clearly safer than RAID-5 as you can survive the loss of two drives instead of a single drive, but that doesn't mean that RAID-5 is unsafe.

If you are going to run a RAID 5 array, make sure you run a scrub or patrol read or whatever the name is that your RAID solution uses. A scrub is nothing more than attempt to try and read all data from disk.

Scrubbing allows detection of bad sectors in advance, so you can replace drives before they cause real problems (like failing during a rebuild).

If you keep the number of drives in a RAID-5 array low, maybe at most 5 or 6, I think for home users, who need to find a balance between cost and capacity, RAID-5 is an acceptable option.

And remember: if you care about your data, you need a backup anyway.

This topic was also discussed on reddit.

When building your own DIY home NAS, it is important that you simulate and test drive failures before you put your important data on it. It makes sense to know what to do in case a drive needs to be replaced. I also recommend putting a substantial amount of data on your NAS and see how long a resilver takes just so you know what to expect.

There are many reports of people building their own (ZFS-based) NAS who found out after a drive failure that resilvering would take days. If your chosen redundancy level for the VDEV would not protect against a second drive failure in the same VDEV (Mirror, RAID-Z) things may get scary. Especially because drives are quite bussy rebuilding data and the extra load on the remaining drives may increase the risk of a second failure.

The chosen RAID level for your VDEV, has an impact on the resilver performance. You may chose to accept lower resilver performance in exchange for additional redundancy (RAID-Z2, RAID-Z3).

I did wonder though how much those resilver times would differ between the various RAID levels. This is why I decided to run some tests to get some numbers.

Test hardware

I've used some test equipment running Debian Jessie + ZFS on Linux. The hardware is rather old and the CPU may have an impact on the results.

CPU : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E7400  @ 2.80GHz
RAM : 8 GB
HBA : HighPoint RocketRaid 2340 (each drive in a jbod)
Disk: Samsung Spinpoint F1 - 1 TB - 7200 RPM ( 12 x )

Test method

I've created a script that runs all tests automatically. This is how the script works:

1. Create pool + vdev(s).
2. Write data on pool ( XX % of pool capacity)
3. Replace arbitrary drive with another one.
4. Wait for resilver to complete.
5. Log resilver duration o csv file.

For each test, I fill the pool up to 25% with data before I measure resilver performance.

Caveats

The problem with the pool only being filled for 25% is that drives are fast at the start, but their performance deteriorates significantly as they fill up. This means that you cannot extrapolate the results and calculate resilver times for 50% or 75% pool usage, the numbers are likely worse than that.

I should run the test again with 50% usage to see if we can demonstrate this effect.

Beware that this test method is probably only suitable for DIY home NAS builds. Production file systems used within businesses may be way more fragmented and I've been told that this could slow down resilver times dramatically.

Test result (lower is better)

The results can only be used to demonstrate the relative resilver performance differences of the various RAID levels and disk counts per VDEV.

You should not expect the same performance results for your own NAS as the hardware probably differs significantly from my test setup.

Observations

I think the following observations can be made:

1. Mirrors resilver the fastest even if the number of drives involved is increased.
2. RAID-Z resilver performance is on-par with using mirrors when using 5 disks or less.
3. RAID-Zx resilver performance deteriorates as the number of drives in a VDEV increases.

I find it interesting that with smaller number of drives in a RAID-Z VDEV, rebuild performance is roughly on par with a mirror setup. If long rebuild times would scare you away from using RAID-Z, maybe it should not. There may be other reasons why you might shy away from RAID-Z, but this doesn't seem one of them.

RAID-Z2 is often very popular amongst home NAS builders, as it offers a very nice balance between capacity and redundancy. Wider RAID-Z2 VDEVs are more space efficient, but it is also clear that resilver operations take longer. Because RAID-Z2 can tollerate the loss of two drives, I think longer resilver times seem like a reasonable tradeoff.

It is clear that as you put more disks in a single RAID-Zx VDEV, rebuild times increase. This can be used as an argument to keep the number of drives per VDEV 'reasonable' or to switch to RAID-Z3.

25% vs 50% pool usage

To me, there's nothing special to see here. The resilver times are on average slightly worse than double the 25% resilver durations. As disks performance start to deteriorate as they fill up (inner tracks are shorter/slower) sequential performance drops. So this is why I would explain the results are slightly worse than perfect linear scaling.

Final words

I hope this benchmark is of interest to anyone and more importantly, you can run your own by using the aforementioned script. If you ever want to run your own benchmarks, expect the script to run for days. Leave a comment if you have questions or remarks about these test results or the way testing is done.

Introduction

Update December 2023: In June, it was announced that iXsystems would sponsor implementing the VDEV expansion feature. A new pr has been created for this effort. The feature was merged into the code base, but may not be available to the general public before the end of 2024.

Many home NAS builders consider using ZFS for their file system. But there is a caveat with ZFS that people should be aware of.

Although ZFS is free software, implementing ZFS is not free. The key issue is that expanding capacity with ZFS is more expensive compared to legacy RAID solutions.

With ZFS, you either have to buy all storage you expect to need upfront, or you will be wasting a few hard drives on redundancy you don't need.

This fact is often overlooked, but it's very important to take it in consideration when planning a NAS build.

Other software RAID solutions like Linux MDADM lets you grow an existing RAID array with one disk at a time. This is also true for many hardware-based RAID solutions¹. This is ideal for home users because you can expand on a per-need basis.

ZFS does not allow this!

To understand why using ZFS may cost you extra money, we will dig a little bit into ZFS itself.

Quick recap of ZFS

The schema below illustrates the architecture of ZFS. There are a few things you should take away from it.

The main takeaway of this picture is that your ZFS pool and thus your file system is based on one or more VDEVs. And those VDEVs contain the actual hard drives.

Fault-tolerance or redundancy is addressed within a VDEV. A VDEV is either a mirror (RAID-1), RAIDZ (RAID-5) or RAIDZ2 (RAID-6)².

So it's important to understand that a ZFS pool itself is not fault-tolerant. If you lose a single VDEV within a pool, you lose the whole pool. You lose the pool, all data is lost.

You can't add hard drives to a VDEV

Now it's very important to understand that you cannot add hard drives to a VDEV.

This is the key limitation of ZFS as seen from the perspective of home NAS builders.

To expand the storage capacity of your pool, you need to add extra VDEVs. And because each VDEV needs to take care of its own redundancy, you also need to buy extra drives for parity.

I will quickly add that there is a way out: replace every hard drive in the VDEV, one by one, with a higher capacity hard drive. You will have to 'rebuild' or 'resilver' the VDEV after each replacement, but it will work, although it's a bit cumbersome and quite expensive.

So back to the topic at hand: what does this limitation mean in real life? I'll give an example.

Let's say you plan on building a small NAS with a capacity of four drives. Please don't create a three-drive RAID-Z thinking you can just add the fourth drive when you need to, because that's not possible.

In this example, you would be better off buying the fourth drive upfront and create a four-drive RAID-Z. This is an example where you are forced to buy the extra space you don't need yet upfront because expanding is otherwise not possible.

You could have expanded your pool with another VDEV consisting of a minimum of three drives (if you run RAID-Z) but the chassis has only room for one extra drive so that doesn't work.

Planning your ZFS Build with the VDEV limitation in mind

Many home NAS builders use RAID-6 (RAID-Z2) for their builds, because of the extra redundancy. This makes sense because a double drive failure is not something unheard of, especially during rebuilds where all drives are being taxed quite heavily for many hours.

I personally would recommend running RAID-Z2 over RAID-Z1 if you go over five to six drives and to spend the extra money on the additional hard drive it requires. Actually, With RAID-Z2 or RAID-6, I think it's perfectly reasonable to run a single VDEV at home with up to 12 drives³.

With RAID-Z2 however, the 'ZFS tax' is even more clearly visible. By having to add an additional VDEV, you will also lose two drives due to parity overhead.

Please note that the 'yellow' drives mark the parity/redundancy overhead. It does not mark where parity data lives (it's striped across all drives).

Let's illustrate the above picture with an example. Your NAS chassis can hold a maximum of twelve drives. You start out with six drives in a RAID-Z2. At some point you want to expand. The cheapest option is to expand with another RAID-Z2 consisting of four drives (minimum size of a RAID-Z2 VDEV).

With a cost of $150 per hard drive⁵, expanding the capacity of your pool will cost you $600 instead of $150 (single drive) and $300 dollar of the $600 (50%) is wasted on redundancy you don't really need.

Furthermore, you can no longer expand your pool, so the remaining two drive slots are 'wasted'⁴. You end up with a maximum of ten drives.

In this example, to make use of the drive capacity of your NAS chassis, you should expand with another six hard drives. That would cost you $900 and $300 of that $900 (33%) is wasted on redundancy. This is illustrated above.

Storage-wise it's more efficient to expand with six drives instead of four. But it will cost you another $300 to expand, paying for storage you may not immediately need.

But both options aren't that efficient. Because you end up using four drives for parity where two would - in my view - be sufficient.

So, if you want to get the most capacity out of that chassis, and the most space per dollar, your only option is to buy all twelve drives upfront and create a single RAID-Z2 consisting of twelve drives.

Buying all drives upfront is expensive and you may only benefit from that extra space years down the road.

Summary

So I hope this example clearly illustrates the issue at hand. With ZFS, you either need to buy all storage upfront or you will lose hard drives to redundancy you don't need, reducing the maximum storage capacity of your NAS.

You have to decide what your needs are. ZFS is an awesome file system that offers you way better data integrity protection than other file system + RAID solution combination.

But implementing ZFS has a certain 'cost'. You must decide if ZFS is worth it for you.

Update April 2023: It has been fairly quiet since the announcement of RAIDZ expansion. The Github PR about this feature is rather stale and people are wondering what the status is and what the plans are. Meanwhile, FreeBSD has announced In February 2023 that they suspect to integrate RAIDZ expansion by Q3.

Update June 2021| It seems that RAIDZ expansion is now being worked on. It will probably be available somewhere around August 2022.

I have written a blogpost about this new feature. The bad news is that adding drives to an existing vdev may accrue some overhead, but the good news is that this overhead can be recovered.

Update October 2017 | Please note that RAIDZ expansion is under development.

RAIDZ expansion (most requested ZFS feature ever?) is coming, courtesy of @freebsdfndation. Sneak preview at OpenZFS DevSummit!

— OpenZFS (@OpenZFS) October 19, 2017

Addressing some feedback

I found out that my article was discussed on a vodcast of BSDNOW.

This article also got some attention on hacker news.

To me, some of the feedback is not 'wrong' but feels rather disingenuous or not relevant for the intended audience of this article. I have provided the links so you can make up your own mind.

This article has a particular user group in mind so you really should think about how much their needs align with yours.

You are steering people away from ZFS

No I don't and this is not my intention. I run ZFS myself on two servers. I do feel that sometimes the downsides of ZFS are wiped under the rug and we should be very open and clear about them towards people seeking advice.

Use mirrors not RAID-Z(2/3)!

Doesn't make much sense to me for home NAS builders.

Using mirrors is wasting space

Advising people to use mirrors instead of RAID-Z(2/3) I do find a little bit disingenuous. Because you are throwing away 50% of your disk capacity. With RAIDZ you 'lose' 33% for three drives, 25% for four drives. If we look at RAIDZ2, we would 'lose' 33% for six drives, 25% for eight drives and only 20% for ten drives.

In the end, you are waisting multiple drives worth of storage capacity depending on the number of drives in your pool.

Adding mirrors with larger drives

As time goes by, larger disks become cheaper. So it could make sense to expand your pool with mirrors based on bigger drives than the original drives you started out on. The size of your pool would increase. However, it's still only 50% space efficient.

Random I/O performance is better

Using mirrors is running RAID 10. Yes you can expand your pool with two drives at a time, and you gain better random I/O performance. However, the large majority of home NAS builders don't care about random I/O performance. You just care if you can saturate gigabit and have one big pool of storage. In that case, you don't need the random IOPs.

If you run some VMs from your storage that require high storage performance, it's an entirely different matter. But I expect that most DIY NAS builders just want some storage to put a ton of data on and nothing more.

RAIDZ2 is more reliable than using mirrors

The redundancy of RAIDZ2 beats using mirrors. (If during a rebuild the surviving member of a mirror fails (the one disk in the pool that is taxed the most during rebuild) you lose your pool. With RAIDZ2 any second drive can fail and you are still OK.

There is only one 'upside' regarding mirrors that is discussed in the next section.

Mirror rebuild times are better

The only upside of using mirrors is that in the event a disk has failed and the new disk is being 'resilvered' it is reported that those rebuilds tend to be faster than if you use RAID-Z(2/3). I think this is no different from legacy RAID, where the main difference with ZFS is that ZFS only rebuilds actual data, not the entire disk.

ZFS rebuilds are faster

This is indeed a benefit of ZFS. The question is how relevant it is for you.

ZFS only rebuilds data. Legacy RAID just rebuilds every 'bit' on a drive. The latter takes longer than the former. So with legacy RAID, rebuild times depend on the size of a single drive, not on the number of drives in the array, no matter how much data you have stored on your array.

My old 18 TB server was based on a single twenty-drive RAID 6 using MDADM. It took 5 hours to rebuild a 1 TB drive. If you would have used 4 TB drives, it would have taken 20 hours if I'm allowed to extrapolate. With ZFS - if you would have been using only 50% of capacity - those rebuild times would have been half of this.

Personally with RAID6 or with RAIDZ2, rebuild times aren't that a big of a deal as you can lose a second drive and still be safe.

Just replace existing drives with bigger ones!

I did briefly touch this option in the article above. I will address it again. The problem with this approach is twofold. First, you can't expand storage capacity as you need it. You need to replace all existing drives with larger ones.

The procedure itself is also a bit cumbersome and time intensive. You need to replace each drive one by one. And every time, you need to 'resilver' your VDEV. Only when all drives have been replaced you will be able to grow the size of your pool.

If you are OK with this approach - and people have used it - it is a way to work around the 'ZFS-tax'.

Not using ZFS is putting your data at great risk!

The BSDNOW podcasts seems to agree with me that if you want true data safety, this 'ZFS-tax' is just the price you have to pay. Either you go with mirrors or you accept the extra parity redundancy.

It is not my goal to steer you away from ZFS. The above is true. ZFS offers something no other (stable) file system currently offers to home NAS builders. But at a cost.

The thing is that I find it perfectly reasonable for home NAS users to just buy a Synology, QNAP or some ready-made NAS from another quality brand. That's what the majority of people do and I think it's a reasonable option. I don't think you are taking crazy risks if you would do so.

If you do build your own home NAS, it's reasonable to accept the 'risk' of using Windows with storage spaces or hardware RAID. Or using Linux with MDADM or hardware RAID. I would say: ZFS is clearly technically the better option, but those 'legacy' options are not so bad that you are taking unreasonable risks with your data.

So using ZFS is the better option, it's up to you and your particular needs and circumstances to decide if using ZFS is worth it for you.