I recently moved my files to a new zfs-pool and used that chance to properly configure my datasets.
This led me to discovering zfs-deduplication.
As most of my storage is used by my jellyfin library (~7-8Tb), which is mostly uncompressed bluray rips I thought I might be able to save some storage using deduplication in addition to compression.
Has anyone here used that for similar files before? What was your experience with it?
I am not too worried about performance. The dataset in question is rarely changed. Basically only when I add more media every couple of months. I also have overshot my cpu-target when originally configuring my server so there is a lot of headroom there. I have 32Gb of ram which is not really fully utilized either (but I also would not mind upgrading to 64 too much).
My main concern is that I am unsure it is useful. I suspect just because of the amount of data and similarity in type there would statistically be a lot of block-level duplication but I could not find any real world data or experiences on that.
ZFS in general is pretty memory hungry. I set up my proxmox sever with zfs pools a while ago and now I kind of regret it. ZFS in itself is very nice and has a ton of useful features, but I just don’t have the hardware nor the usage pattern to benefit from it that much on my server. I’d rather have that thing running on LVM and/or software raid to have more usable memory for my VM’s. And that’s one of the projects I’ve been planning for the server, replace zfs pools with something which suits my usage patterns better, but that’s a whole another story and requires some spare money and some spare time, which I don’t really either at hand right now.