[kbumsik]

Yes. Much faster. Especially for HDDs. But at a cost of a lot of RAM. Also lz4 compression can speed up your HDDs up to 10x (!) to read and 3x to write. [1, see "To compress, or not to compress, that is the question" section.] But it's going to have a considerably higher CPU usage as well.

[1]: https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html

[ksec]

>But it's going to have a considerably higher CPU usage as well.

I am going to assume in three to four years time this wouldn't be a problem? I mean a 16nm Quad Core ARM Cortex SoC are only $15.

Unfortunately no consumer NAS are implementing ZFS. ( TrueNAS offering isn't really consumer NAS )

[kbumsik]

I am not sure about cheap ARM devices but I am using an old Haswell i5-4670 and it is more than enough. So it won't be issue later.

Also, when you are talking about consumer NAS, the real problem is that any low-end systems can saturate the gigabit network (100MB/s) very easily so investing on extra resources for ZFS doesn't make difference. At least a 10Gbe network (which is beyond the average consumer) is required to actually make it useful.

[pdimitar]

I repurposed a micro Dell Optiplex 3060 with 8GB RAM and two external HDDs totalling 9TB of space. The CPU is an i3. The whole thing takes less space than a book.

I have lz4 enabled and the gigabit link is almost completely saturated when transferring: 119 MB/s out of the total theoretical 125.

No ZIL, no L2ARC devices are attached. That thing is _flying_ as a home NAS.

[ksec]

> can saturate the gigabit network

Yes I completely forgotten about that. But 2.5/5 Gbps Ethernet is finally coming along.

Hopefully someday. ZFS will come.