ZFS is not that heavy on parity calcs. But you need a 64bit CPU to get speed. I had a 32bit CPU Pentium 2.4GHz and got 20-30MB/sec. With 64bit CPU I get over 100MB/sec.
You should also benchmark a three raidz2 with 8 drives in each vdev, versus two raidz2 with 12 drives in each vdev. raidz2 is recommended, not raidz1. If you have many disks and need safety, maybe raidz3 is prefered. Try to avoid raidz1 - because a large 2TB or 3TB drive may take several days to resilver a zpool. And that causes additional stress on the other disks. One more may break. This happens a lot. If you swap drives out to 4TB or 5TB disks later, it may take one week of resilver. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
