Solved ZFS filesystem and NTFS filesystem

[sandypk]

Z filesystem and NTFS

Hi, have a 20TB NAS box which runs on freenas. This box contains images / videos used for editing purpose. The software Fotostation is being used to manage images/videos. Issue is the images / videos are loaded very slow to the system (PC) from the NAS box.

Iam checking the NAS box for resource utilization while the work in process also looking at the network side (NAs connects via fiber to switch and PC via CAT 5 cable (same vlan, also checking with CAT 6 cable as it has a 10G port).

Question is whether ZFS has any issues working with NTFS as the PC are on Windows 7 also the software vendor says us to move to NTFS. Please advice. Thank you.

 

[marsmimar]

I have no idea if this will help, but according to this thread, there is no OS level support for ZFS in Windows. The best thing to do is use a ZFS compliant OS in a virtual machine such as Open Solaris, FreeBSD, or Linux (through zfs-fuse, or zfs-on-linux.)

Another contributor to the thread states:

ZFS in virtual machine can work just fine if follow one simple rule never ever lie to ZFS. ZFS goes to great length to keep your data from getting corrupted (checksums, copy-on-write, dittoblocks, mirrors or raid-z, etc) so you should do everything in your power to let ZFS directly access your disks. All the horror stories of virtualized ZFS issues come from some level of buffered IO from virtualization software buffers, disk controller cache or even windows with writethrough cache if you're dumb enough to use virtual disks instead of whole raw disks. Each virtualization package does raw disks slightly differently, but VMWare Workstation, VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox all support it without too much effort.

Source

If this is just useless information, I sincerely apologize.

 

[sandypk]

Thanks Marsmimar for the suggestion, was held up quiet a while. I suppose, could not find any option and have to add another HDD to the controller with a slight addition of a component that support the HDD. Further, install WIn2K8 Server. That was the only option. As well looking for an IBM / Dell Storage.