pyrosis

pyrosis, 5 days ago

Have a look at Stirling PDF. It’s a self hosted alternative to most if not all Adobe functions that she might care about. It can be setup with docker.

github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

pyrosis, 5 days ago

This takes a degree of understanding of what you are doing and why it fails.

I’ve done some research on this myself and the answer is the USB controller. Specifically the way the USB controller “shares” bandwidth. It is not the way a sata controller or a pci lane deals with this.

ZFS expects direct control of the disk to operate correctly and anything that gets in between the file system and the disk is a problem.

I the case of USB let’s say you have two USB - nvme adapters plugged in to the same system in a basic zfs mirror. ZFS will expect to mirror operations between these devices but will be interrupted by the USB controller constantly sharing bandwidth between these two devices.

A better but still bad solution would be something like a USB to SATA enclosure. In this situation if you installed a couple disks in a mirror on the enclosure… They would be using a single USB port and the controller would at least keep the data on one lane instead of constantly switching.

Regardless if you want to dive deeper you will need to do reading on USB controllers and bandwidth sharing.

If you want a stable system give zfs direct access to your disks and accept it will damage zfs operations over time if you do not.

pyrosis, 5 days ago

Not without good logs or debugging tools.

You need to know what to observe. You are not going to get the information you are looking for directly from zfs or even system logs.

What I suggest stands. You have to understand the behavior of the USB controller. That information is acquired from researching USB itself.

Now if you intend to utilize something like a USB enclosure you indeed would be better off with something like ext4. However, keep in mind that this effect is not directly a file system issue. It’s an issue with how USB controllers interact with file systems.

That has been my experience from researching this matter. ZFS is simply more sensitive.

In my experience even for motherboards that have port limitations it’s possible to take advantage of pci lanes and install a hba with an onboard SATA controller. They also make pci devices that will accept nvme drives.

Good luck with your experimentation and research.