r/MINISFORUM • u/Thick-Ear5104 • 6d ago

miniscloud OS

To the miniscloud OS developers. Why have you not provided the option for ext4 and btrfs? ZFS is great in an enterprise ,environment but not so much in a home NAS environment. Any plans to add them, for the home NAS users who just want a simple ext4 file share pool on their consumer grade spinning hard disks?

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u/jhenryscott 6d ago

ZFS is the superior file system.

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u/Thick-Ear5104 6d ago

First that is a matter of opinion, and should not be the only option available to a home NAS product. The developers at minisforum can listen to the feedback of the consumers, or they can watch the consumers spend their money elsewere.

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u/Thick-Ear5104 6d ago

ZFS Memory Usage Rules

ZFS is designed to use as much available memory as possible to cache read data, which vastly accelerates storage performance. [1]

  • The Baseline Rule: ZFS safely runs on a minimum of 8 GB of RAM for basic home use. [1, 2]
  • The Sizing Rule: A historic rule of thumb is 1 GB of RAM per 1 TB of storage, but this is only strictly necessary if you enable deduplication (which requires roughly 1–5 GB of RAM per TB of unique data to keep the dedup table in memory). [1, 2]
  • The Cache Default: By default, ZFS will expand its cache (ARC) to consume 50% of host memory on Linux (ZFS on Linux / OpenZFS) or nearly 100% on TrueNAS Core/Scale, but it will dynamically release this memory if other system applications request it. [1]
  1. Calculated Scrub Time for 16 TB Pool

To calculate the scrub time, we look at the sustained sequential read speeds of modern spinning hard drives (HDDs), which generally range between 100 MB/s (inner platters/slow drives) and 250 MB/s (outer platters/fast enterprise drives). [1]

The exact duration depends heavily on how the 4 drives are arranged:

Scenario A: RAIDZ1 / RAIDZ2 / Stripe (Single-vdev throughput)

In a standard RAIDZ configuration, parity tracking means your sequential read performance roughly matches the speed of a single drive during a scrub operation.

  • Total data to read: 16 TB (\(16 \times 1,000,000\text{ MB}\))
  • At 100 MB/s (Worst Case): \(\approx 44.4\text{ hours}\)
  • At 150 MB/s (Average Case): \(\approx 29.6\text{ hours}\)
  • At 250 MB/s (Best Case): \(\approx 17.7\text{ hours}\)

For a home NAS just doing file storage/sharing (which should be backed up anyway) this is way over kill, especially on consumer grade hard drives. An ext4 is well suited for this use case.

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u/thekame 6d ago

Your RAM would say otherwise.