zfs

I've been building out a new Arm-based NAS using ASRock Rack's new 'Deep Micro ATX' motherboard for Ampere Altra and Altra Max CPUs.

I posted about the hardware earlier, in Building an efficient server-grade Arm NAS. Go check that out if you want details on the specific hardware in this setup.

But at the end of the build, I installed Rocky Linux, and found the power consumption to be a bit higher than expected—over 150W at idle!

As it turns out, the NAS must've been doing something when I took that initial measurement, because after monitoring it for a few more days, the normal idle power usage was around 123W instead.

When I heard about Radxa's Taco—a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4-powered NAS/router-in-a-box—I knew what must be done.

Load it up with as much SSD storage as I can afford, and see what it can do.

And after installing five Samsung 870 QVO 8TB SSDs and one Sabrent Rocket Q NVMe SSD—loading up every drive slot on the Taco to the tune of 48TB raw storage—I found out it can actually do a lot! Just... not very fast. At least not compared to a modern desktop.

Special thanks to Lambda for sponsoring this project—I was originally going to put a bunch of the cheapest SSDs I had on hand on the Taco and call it a day, but with Lambda's help I was able to buy the 8TB SSDs to make this the most overpowered Pi storage project ever!

This is a simple guide, part of a series I'll call 'How-To Guide Without Ads'. In it, I'm going to document how I set up a ZFS zpool in RAIDZ1 in Linux on a Raspberry Pi.

Prequisites

ZFS does not enjoy USB drives, though it can work on them. I wouldn't really recommend ZFS for the Pi 4 model B or other Pi models that can't use native SATA, NVMe, or SAS drives.

For my own testing, I am using a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and there are a variety of PCI Express storage controller cards and carrier boards with integrated storage controllers that make ZFS much happier.

I have also only tested ZFS on 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS, on Compute Modules with 4 or 8 GB of RAM. No guarantees under other configurations.

Installing ZFS

Since ZFS is not bundled with other Debian 'free' software (because of licensing issues), you need to install the kernel headers, then install two ZFS packages: