this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2025
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The big thing is very easily mix and match different sizes of disks. ZFS as of recently can sort of do that, but its not as efficient.
Does it also perform better than snapraid?
Mergerfs can do that too and you can keep the underlying fs as whatever you want.
It has no parity, you can pair with snapraid but thats snapshot parity and not real-time parity. Depends on the use case if that would work or not.
Also no caching options.
Valid points. I use it for my media collection I can easily restore and won't miss. Cache would be sort of nice to have and redundancy would just be wasting space.
Yeah media is a good use case for it, and doesnt really need cache either.
Yes, but it does not have redundancy or caching. Redundancy can be achieved with snapraid, but how you get caching I don’t know…
Doesn't work for every use case, but perfect for mine. I was just pointing out other options.
And that is good! It would have been a better answer if you mentioned these major limitations as well so that interested people don’t need to look it up :)
Can 100% do this. Not just kinda. Works fine.
Can it access a file without spinning up all disks in the array?
I haven't used ZFS in like a decade, but would strongly consider going back to it if it can do that now.
Not really with the same flexibility.
You only get usable capacity of the smallest disk in a vdev or you have to add a new vdev with your newly sized disks.
Unraid lets you mix and match however you like and get all the usable capacity (as long as your parity is your largest sized disks).
It can't, you lose space efficiency if the disks you add aren't the same size as the old disks.