[OmniOS-discuss] Connect single USB disk to OmniOS ? Filesystem options?

[Andrew Gabriel]

On 12/07/2017 10:56, Svavar Örn Eysteinsson wrote:
> Hello.
>
> I need to connect a single USB disk to my HP Microserver NL54 running OmniOS.
> Going to utilize it as a backup disk for some resources on my home LAN.
> The Microserver does have many USB ports that would be fine to utilize, as I have filled the 3.5" slots in the server
> in RAIDZ modes.
>
> The thing is, what options do I have as formating the disk? Is it only the ancient UFS and
> the FAT32 which is not going to do it's job because of file size limit ?
>
> And correct me if I'm wrong, ZFS on a single disk is not a nice job.

ZFS on a single disk is just fine.
Its options for recovery from corruptions are limited compared with 
redundant RAID setups, but still much better than any of the other 
filesystems you mention on a single disk (metadata is all two or more 
copies), and you have the option to scrub and find all corruptions, 
which none of the others have.

I actually run the next generation of microserver with rpool on a 64GB 
USB thumb drive (although I do run it with copies=2, and that's Solaris 
11.3 rather than OmniOS, but I don't think that will make any difference 
in this case).

> btw, I do have 16GB ECC memory on the HP Microserver.
>
> As OpenIndiana distro has the NTFS fuse modules available, but there isn't any available
> for OmniOS. Any reason why?
>
> So my options are what, UFS and FAT32 ?
>
>
> Thank you kindly all.
> Best regards,
>
> Svavar Orn
> Reykjavik - Iceland