Piotr has a Cheap Dedicated Server with 100TB of Disk: Optimizing it With ZFS

May 07, 2023 @ 1:09 pm

Piotr has 10x10TB drives (yes, seriously) and wants to maximize usage of his space while still having protection against failures. ZFS is a great option for this – highly performant, very flexible, and solid code that’s been in production for a long time.

ZFS – the Zettabyte File System – was developed by Sun Microsystems back when they were still a thing. It started on Solaris and then as open sourced. For a long time there were licensing issues which is why early on it was available on *BSD systems but not Linux, but this is all a thing of the past now.

ZFS is 128-bit, which means it can store…well, a lot of data. To full populate a single storage pool would require 3×10²⁴ TB drives.

Even Piotr doesn’t have that many.

Setting it all up on But it’s not as simple as it looks. Fortunately Piotr has a quick tutorial on how to use (or modify) a simple script to do all the heavy lifting for you.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308