HOWTO: Leverage mbuffer and Netcat for low-powered systems (command-line)

Yes, but using the command-line offers some additional benefits:

  • It empowers users to learn how to work with the command-line and demystifies what happens under the GUI.
  • The same steps can be used for any ZFS server, even if the sender is not TrueNAS.

Quite a good deal for low-end systems, such as my poor baby dual-core Celeron that serves as a dedicated backup server. Even more of a difference if both sides are under-powered.

As you noted, if the datasets are already encrypted (or need further encryption for non-raw streams), it adds yet another redundant extra overhead.

For a local network? It’s overkill.


The difference will probably be even more noticeable if you’re exclusively using SSDs / NVMEs and network interfaces beyond 1 GbE.

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