Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2010-01-15 Thread Charles Edge
To have Mac OS X connect via iSCSI:
http://krypted.com/mac-os-x/how-to-use-iscsi-on-mac-os-x/
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-17 Thread JZ
[Just do not want to be misleading]

I think there is one aspect of the Zhou style is heavily misleading.
And that is how do we deal with ladies.

Personally, I have my opinions about ladies being open and career-minded, but 
those are not important.

What is important, would be how should we deal with ladies at a professional 
level.
To me personally, if a lady claims to me as a professional, not as a female, 
then I will take her as a professional, and will consider very little of the 
general policy for being a gentleman.  Otherwise, it would not be fair in 
corporations, in my personal view.  

But if the lady does not claim professional to me, then my approaches would 
be completely different.
[and those approaches are not for sharing, since they are not IT related.]

I don't know if this email is even relevant to the list discussion. I will 
leave that conclusion to the smart mail server policy here.   
:-)
But if I have sent through some misleading text, this email is for the 
clarification.

Best,
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-17 Thread Brent Jones
On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 2:46 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:


 I don't know if this email is even relevant to the list discussion. I will
 leave that conclusion to the smart mail server policy here.


*cough*


-- 
Brent Jones
br...@servuhome.net
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-09 Thread Ian Collins
Joel Buckley wrote:

 Search http://store.sun.com; for the item that matches your
 needs and run with it.  Sun currently has a promotion on X4150
 Servers...  That will easily be able to serve NFS, SunRay,
 etc... to your home.

   
Do they come with free ear plugs for the family? :)

-- 
Ian.

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-09 Thread The Moog
I wouldn't know which laptops (beside macbooks) that specifically support zfs, 
but I'm sure with a little twiddling around and some general know-how, many a 
system would operate the latest version of opensolaris.  Driver support is 
always my biggest worry. 
Sent from my BlackBerry Bold® 
http://www.blackberrybold.com

-Original Message-
From: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com

Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2009 18:52:10 
To: m...@pixelshift.com; zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org; Scott 
Lairdsc...@sigkill.org
Cc: Orvar Korvarknatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com; 
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Kornpeter.k...@sun.com
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


OMG!
what a critical factor I just didn't think about!!!
stupid me!

Moog, please, which laptops are supporting ZFS today?
I will only buy within those.

z, at home, feeling better, but still a bit confused


- Original Message - 
From: The Moog m...@pixelshift.com
To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com; 
zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org; Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
Cc: Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com; 
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 6:50 PM
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Are you planning to run Solaris on your laptop?

 Sent from my BlackBerry Bold®
 http://www.blackberrybold.com

 -Original Message-
 From: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com

 Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2009 18:27:52
 To: Scott Lairdsc...@sigkill.org
 Cc: Orvar Korvarknatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com; 
 zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Kornpeter.k...@sun.com
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Thanks much Scott,
 I still don't know what you are talking about -- my $3000 to $800 laptops
 all never needed to swap any drive.

 But yeah, I got hit on all of them when I was in china, by the china web
 virus that no U.S. software could do anything [then a china open source
 thing did the job]

 So, without the swapping HD concern, what should I do???

 z at home still confused


 - Original Message - 
 From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au; Brandon High
 bh...@freaks.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn
 peter.k...@sun.com; Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 6:20 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 You can't trust any hard drive.  That's what backups are for :-).

 Laptop hard drives aren't much worse than desktop drives, and 2.5
 SATA drives are cheap.  As long as they're easy to swap, then a drive
 failure isn't the end of the world.  Order a new drive ($100 or so),
 swap them, and restore from backup.

 I haven't dealt with PC laptops in years, so I can't really compare
 models.


 Scott

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:40 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:
 Thanks Scott,
 I was really itchy to order one, now I just want to save that open $ for
 Remy+++.

 Then, next question, can I trust any HD for my home laptop? should I go
 get
 a Sony VAIO or a cheap China-made thing would do?
 big price delta...

 z at home

 - Original Message - From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au; Brandon High
 bh...@freaks.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn
 peter.k...@sun.com; Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:36 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Today?  Low-power SSDs are probably less reliable than low-power hard
 drives, although they're too new to really know for certain.  Given
 the number of problems that vendors have had getting acceptable write
 speeds, I'd be really amazed if they've done any real work on
 long-term reliability yet.  Going forward, SSDs will almost certainly
 be more reliable, as long as you have something SMART-ish watching the
 number of worn-out SSD cells and recommending preemptive replacement
 of worn-out drives every few years.  That should be a slow,
 predictable process, unlike most HD failures.


 Scott

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:30 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:

 I was think about Apple's new SSD drive option on laptops...

 is that safer than Apple's HD or less safe? [maybe Orvar can help me 
 on
 this]

 the price is a bit hefty for me to just order for experiment...
 Thanks!
 z at home


 - Original Message - From: Toby Thain
 t...@telegraphics.com.au
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org; Brandon High
 bh...@freaks.com;
 zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:25 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?



 On 7-Jan-09, at 9:43 PM, JZ wrote:

 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing
 on
 you.

 But do I have to spell this out

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-09 Thread David Dyer-Bennet

On Thu, January 8, 2009 15:35, Tim wrote:
 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:43 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:

 Can we focus on commercial usage?
 please!

 I dunno about you, but I need somewhere to store that music so I can
 stream
 it throughout the house while I'm drinking that wine ;)  A single disk
 windows box isn't really my cup-o-tea.  Plus, I'm a geek, my vmware farm
 needs it's nfs mounts on some solid, high performing gear.

While my music has ended up there, it's my digital photos that actually
pushed me into an NAS-type environment.  I wanted something better than
single-disk reliability plus backups, plus I've found my backups happen
better on the Solaris-based NAS than they did under windows (I never found
an adequate Windows backup product, whereas rsync to external USB drives
works perfectly, with the added benefit that my backup isn't locked up in
a proprietary format).

The enterprise features figure prominently, especially snapshots.  And
it's a BIG DEAL for me to know that a scrub has verified data even if I
haven't accessed it lately; old photos in my collection are still
important to me.

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-09 Thread Miles Nordin
 re == Richard Elling richard.ell...@sun.com writes:

re Flash has been around for well over 25 years

there is NOR flash and NAND flash, though.  I think NOR is 25 years
old, and MLC and SLC FLASH are both NAND right?  NOR and NAND have
completely different behavior and implementation, and even within NAND
the number of tolerated write cycles varies wildly MLC vs SLC and
vendor vs vendor.

Also wasn't someone saying the cheapo USB sticks do wear leveling in
16MB chunks, so if one of the chunks is hotter than others you might
blow it sooner than you expect based on device-wide write cycles *
size / bandwidth?  software people would assume the wear leveling
chunk size is the entire device, otherwise what does ``level'' mean,
but apparently the electrical engineer monkeys have a different idea.
The quality or chunk-size of wear leveling could vary from one device
to another.

I think hard disks are a little different in their failure behavior
after increasing 100x in capacity, too, though.

re Trivia: Sun has been shipping flash memory for nearly its
re entire history.

are you talking about the firmware?  because that's NOR FLASH which is
completely different.

I'm not saying don't use it, but this sounds too much like Apple
telling us 400 megaBIT/s firewire is faster than 80 megaBYTE/s
parallel-SCSI.

re It occurs to me that you might be too young to remember that
re format(1m) was the tool used to do media analysis and map bad
re sectors before those smarts were moved onto the disk ? ;-)

yeah im old enough to remember.

the smarts stayed redundantly in format long after it was moved into
the disk.

I thought one of those netapp .pdf's said they deliberately tell some
of their SCSI/FC disks to stop doing reallocation and pass bad block
errors up the stack.  but aside from that all these SCSI disks do it,
even the 5.25 ones.  I'm old enough to remember that every SCSI Sun
system I've used including even VME-based systems and Sun3/60's use
SCSI disks which would do their own bad block remapping.

I haven't used SMD disks.  I used ST506 and ESDI disks in peecees, and
with those you got a sheet of dot-matrix printout taped to the top of
the drive by the manufacturer.  The factory test for bad sectors with
special controller boards that you don't have, to find marginal
sectors you will miss if you do your own ``low-level format''
scan---although the disk layer does have to do remapping, and although
you do scan for bad sectors during low-level format, with ST506 and
ESDI disks you will not scan any bad sectors not marked on the
printout unless your disk is failing, and you must use the printout to
avoid marginal sectors.


pgpNnGjvgyNHJ.pgp
Description: PGP signature
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-09 Thread JZ
Ok, since this thread is the official spot for home based chatting, I am off 
work now.

Similar feeling from an enterprise perspective --

I am the last person at work that has not even once, logged on to FaceBook. 
[no need, I insist]

And I can do a zFaceBook on 100% zCode anytime, only if I want to spend my 
open time on that.

And security -- I cannot afford the time and efforts to do my own secure 
enterprise at home, so, sorry, the important personal stuff, probably just 
as Mr. Tucci, are all on company infrastructure.   ;-)

best,
z at home


- Original Message - 
From: David Dyer-Bennet d...@dd-b.net
To: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 12:58 PM
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?



 On Thu, January 8, 2009 15:35, Tim wrote:
 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:43 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:

 Can we focus on commercial usage?
 please!

 I dunno about you, but I need somewhere to store that music so I can
 stream
 it throughout the house while I'm drinking that wine ;)  A single disk
 windows box isn't really my cup-o-tea.  Plus, I'm a geek, my vmware farm
 needs it's nfs mounts on some solid, high performing gear.

 While my music has ended up there, it's my digital photos that actually
 pushed me into an NAS-type environment.  I wanted something better than
 single-disk reliability plus backups, plus I've found my backups happen
 better on the Solaris-based NAS than they did under windows (I never found
 an adequate Windows backup product, whereas rsync to external USB drives
 works perfectly, with the added benefit that my backup isn't locked up in
 a proprietary format).

 The enterprise features figure prominently, especially snapshots.  And
 it's a BIG DEAL for me to know that a scrub has verified data even if I
 haven't accessed it lately; old photos in my collection are still
 important to me.

 -- 
 David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
 Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
 Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
 Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread Will Murnane
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 17:12, Volker A. Brandt v...@bb-c.de wrote:
 The Samsung HD103UJ drives are nice, if you're not using
 NVidia controllers - there's a bug in either the drives or the
 controllers that makes them drop drives fairly frequently.

 Do you happen to have more details about this problem?  Or some
 pointers?
We have 3 x2200m2 servers that we added pairs of these drives
(specifically, the HD753UJ variant: 750GB instead of 1TB) to.  We set
up small (40G or so, I forget; we didn't really need the space, but
buying smaller disks wasn't significantly cheaper) SVM mirrors on two
of these machines, and a small SVM mirror plus a large zpool on the
third.  Within two weeks, all three machines had dropped a disk in
some manner.  The behavior we saw goes like this: metastat reports
errors, output of 'format' changes for the dropped disk but still
shows the disk.  If the disk is moved to another machine (a different
chipset; i.e., with another controller) then it shows up fine, all
data intact, everything hunky-dory.  We didn't lose data, but we did
lose an SVM array and had to restore from backups.

We replaced the drives with 4 Maxtors and 2 Seagate ES2s.  None have
reported problems yet.  I don't know of any other solution, if you
don't want to add a controller.  It doesn't appear to be a problem
with the drives, or a problem with the chipset, but the combination of
drive+chipset causes wonkiness.  Google shows some users having
problems with this under XP, so it's probably not just a driver issue.
 This was what made me suspect the combination was a bad one, and
further testing shows that that's probably the case: the drives work
on other controllers, and other drives work on these controllers.

The drives themselves are still working fine; we moved them to a
SCSI-sata jbod with a non-nV controller and they're happy there.

Will
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread Tim
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:43 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:

 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing on you.

 But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented not for
 home use?

 Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home, or just having some wine and
 music?

 Can we focus on commercial usage?
 please!



I dunno about you, but I need somewhere to store that music so I can stream
it throughout the house while I'm drinking that wine ;)  A single disk
windows box isn't really my cup-o-tea.  Plus, I'm a geek, my vmware farm
needs it's nfs mounts on some solid, high performing gear.

--Tim
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread JZ
But, Tim, you are a super IT guy, and your data is not baby...

I just have so many copies of my home baby data, since storage is so so cheap 
today compared to the wine... 
[and a baby JAVA thing to keep them in sync...]

(BTW, I am not a wine guy, I only do Remy+++)
;-)

best,
z
  - Original Message - 
  From: Tim 
  To: JZ 
  Cc: Scott Laird ; Brandon High ; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org ; Peter Korn 
  Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 4:35 PM
  Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?





  On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 8:43 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:

ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing on you.

But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented not for
home use?

Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home, or just having some wine and music?

Can we focus on commercial usage?
please!





  I dunno about you, but I need somewhere to store that music so I can stream 
it throughout the house while I'm drinking that wine ;)  A single disk windows 
box isn't really my cup-o-tea.  Plus, I'm a geek, my vmware farm needs it's nfs 
mounts on some solid, high performing gear.   

  --Tim
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread Toby Thain

On 7-Jan-09, at 9:43 PM, JZ wrote:

 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing  
 on you.

 But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented  
 not for
 home use?

 Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home,

Why would you disrespect your personal data? ZFS is perfect for home  
use, for reasons that have been discussed on this list and elsewhere.

Apple also recognises this, which is why ZFS is in OS X 10.5 and will  
presumably become the default boot filesystem.

Sorry to wander a little offtopic, but IMHO - Apple needs to  
acknowledge, and tell their customers, that hard drives are  
unreliable consumables.

I am desperately looking forward to the day when they recognise the  
need to ship all their systems with:
1) mirrored storage out of the box;
2) easy user-swappable drives;
3) foolproof fault notification and rectification.

There is no reason why an Apple customer should not have this level  
of protection for her photo and video library, Great American Novel,  
or whatever. Time Machine is a good first step (though it doesn't  
often work smoothly for me with a LaCie external FW drive).

These are the neglected pieces, IMHO, of their touted Digital Lifestyle.

--Toby


 or just having some wine and music?

 Can we focus on commercial usage?
 please!



 - Original Message -
 From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: Brandon High bh...@freaks.com
 Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:28 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Brandon High bh...@freaks.com  
 wrote:
 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com
 wrote:
 How much is your time worth?

 Quite a bit.

 Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
 Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
 You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.

 A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home
 for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another
 box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were  
 around
 $200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200.

 I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere  
 near
 $1200. The X4200 uses 2.5 drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding
 more drives ups the cost further. That means the afternoon I spent
 setting my server up was worth $3000. I should tell my boss that.

 A more reasonable comparison would be the Ultra 24. A system with
 4x250 drives is $1650. I could build a 4 TB system today for *less*
 than my 1TB system of 2 years ago, so let's use 3x750 + 1x250  
 drives.
 (That's all the store will let me) and the price jumps to $2641.

 Assume that I buy the cheapest x64 system (the X2100 M2 at $1228)  
 and
 add a drive tray because I want 4 drives ... well I can't. The
 cheapest drive tray is $7465.

 I have trouble justifying Sun hardware for many business  
 applications
 that don't require SPARC, let alone for the home. For custom systems
 that most tinkerers would want at home, a shop like Silicon  
 Mechanics
 (http://www.siliconmechanics.com/) (or even Dell or HP) is almost
 always a better deal on hardware.

 I agree completely.  About a year ago I spent around $800 (w/o  
 drives)
 on a NAS box for home.  I used a 4x PCI-X single-Xeon Supermicro  
 MB, a
 giant case, and a single 8-port Supermicro SATA card.  Then I dropped
 a pair of 80 GB boot drives and 9x 500 GB drives into it.  With  
 raidz2
 plus a spare, that gives me around 2.7T of usable space.  When I
 filled that up a few weeks back, I bought 2 more 8-port SATA cards, 2
 Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-drive hot-swap bays, and 9 1.5T drives, all
 for under $2k.  That's around $0.25/GB for the expansion and $0.36
 overall, including last year's expensive 500G drives.

 The closest that I can come to this config using current Sun hardware
 is probably the X4540 w/ 500G drives; that's $35k for 14T of usable
 disk (5x 8-way raidz2 + 1 spare + 2 boot disks), $2.48/GB.  It's much
 nicer hardware but I don't care.  I'd also need an electrician  
 (for 2x
 240V circuits), a dedicated server room in my house (for the fan
 noise), and probably a divorce lawyer :-).

 Sun's hardware really isn't price-competitive on the low end,
 especially when commercial support offerings have no value to you.
 There's nothing really wrong with this, as long as you understand  
 that
 Sun's really only going to be selling into shops where Sun's support
 and extra engineering makes financial sense.  In Sun's defense, this
 is kind of an odd system, specially built for unusual requirements.

 My NAS box works well enough for me.  It's probably eaten ~20  
 hours of
 my time over the past year, partially because my Solaris is really
 rusty and partially because pkg has left me with broken, unbootable
 systems twice :-(.  It's hard to see how

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread JZ
I was think about Apple's new SSD drive option on laptops...

is that safer than Apple's HD or less safe? [maybe Orvar can help me on 
this]

the price is a bit hefty for me to just order for experiment...
Thanks!
z at home


- Original Message - 
From: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au
To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
Cc: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org; Brandon High bh...@freaks.com; 
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:25 PM
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?



 On 7-Jan-09, at 9:43 PM, JZ wrote:

 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing  on 
 you.

 But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented  not 
 for
 home use?

 Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home,

 Why would you disrespect your personal data? ZFS is perfect for home  use, 
 for reasons that have been discussed on this list and elsewhere.

 Apple also recognises this, which is why ZFS is in OS X 10.5 and will 
 presumably become the default boot filesystem.

 Sorry to wander a little offtopic, but IMHO - Apple needs to  acknowledge, 
 and tell their customers, that hard drives are  unreliable consumables.

 I am desperately looking forward to the day when they recognise the  need 
 to ship all their systems with:
 1) mirrored storage out of the box;
 2) easy user-swappable drives;
 3) foolproof fault notification and rectification.

 There is no reason why an Apple customer should not have this level  of 
 protection for her photo and video library, Great American Novel,  or 
 whatever. Time Machine is a good first step (though it doesn't  often work 
 smoothly for me with a LaCie external FW drive).

 These are the neglected pieces, IMHO, of their touted Digital Lifestyle.

 --Toby


 or just having some wine and music?

 Can we focus on commercial usage?
 please!



 - Original Message -
 From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: Brandon High bh...@freaks.com
 Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:28 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Brandon High bh...@freaks.com  wrote:
 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com
 wrote:
 How much is your time worth?

 Quite a bit.

 Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
 Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
 You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.

 A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home
 for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another
 box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were  around
 $200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200.

 I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere  near
 $1200. The X4200 uses 2.5 drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding
 more drives ups the cost further. That means the afternoon I spent
 setting my server up was worth $3000. I should tell my boss that.

 A more reasonable comparison would be the Ultra 24. A system with
 4x250 drives is $1650. I could build a 4 TB system today for *less*
 than my 1TB system of 2 years ago, so let's use 3x750 + 1x250  drives.
 (That's all the store will let me) and the price jumps to $2641.

 Assume that I buy the cheapest x64 system (the X2100 M2 at $1228)  and
 add a drive tray because I want 4 drives ... well I can't. The
 cheapest drive tray is $7465.

 I have trouble justifying Sun hardware for many business  applications
 that don't require SPARC, let alone for the home. For custom systems
 that most tinkerers would want at home, a shop like Silicon  Mechanics
 (http://www.siliconmechanics.com/) (or even Dell or HP) is almost
 always a better deal on hardware.

 I agree completely.  About a year ago I spent around $800 (w/o  drives)
 on a NAS box for home.  I used a 4x PCI-X single-Xeon Supermicro  MB, a
 giant case, and a single 8-port Supermicro SATA card.  Then I dropped
 a pair of 80 GB boot drives and 9x 500 GB drives into it.  With  raidz2
 plus a spare, that gives me around 2.7T of usable space.  When I
 filled that up a few weeks back, I bought 2 more 8-port SATA cards, 2
 Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-drive hot-swap bays, and 9 1.5T drives, all
 for under $2k.  That's around $0.25/GB for the expansion and $0.36
 overall, including last year's expensive 500G drives.

 The closest that I can come to this config using current Sun hardware
 is probably the X4540 w/ 500G drives; that's $35k for 14T of usable
 disk (5x 8-way raidz2 + 1 spare + 2 boot disks), $2.48/GB.  It's much
 nicer hardware but I don't care.  I'd also need an electrician  (for 2x
 240V circuits), a dedicated server room in my house (for the fan
 noise), and probably a divorce lawyer :-).

 Sun's hardware really isn't price-competitive on the low end,
 especially when commercial support offerings have

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread Scott Laird
Today?  Low-power SSDs are probably less reliable than low-power hard
drives, although they're too new to really know for certain.  Given
the number of problems that vendors have had getting acceptable write
speeds, I'd be really amazed if they've done any real work on
long-term reliability yet.  Going forward, SSDs will almost certainly
be more reliable, as long as you have something SMART-ish watching the
number of worn-out SSD cells and recommending preemptive replacement
of worn-out drives every few years.  That should be a slow,
predictable process, unlike most HD failures.


Scott

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:30 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:
 I was think about Apple's new SSD drive option on laptops...

 is that safer than Apple's HD or less safe? [maybe Orvar can help me on
 this]

 the price is a bit hefty for me to just order for experiment...
 Thanks!
 z at home


 - Original Message - From: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org; Brandon High bh...@freaks.com;
 zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:25 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?



 On 7-Jan-09, at 9:43 PM, JZ wrote:

 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing  on
 you.

 But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented  not
 for
 home use?

 Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home,

 Why would you disrespect your personal data? ZFS is perfect for home  use,
 for reasons that have been discussed on this list and elsewhere.

 Apple also recognises this, which is why ZFS is in OS X 10.5 and will
 presumably become the default boot filesystem.

 Sorry to wander a little offtopic, but IMHO - Apple needs to  acknowledge,
 and tell their customers, that hard drives are  unreliable consumables.

 I am desperately looking forward to the day when they recognise the  need
 to ship all their systems with:
 1) mirrored storage out of the box;
 2) easy user-swappable drives;
 3) foolproof fault notification and rectification.

 There is no reason why an Apple customer should not have this level  of
 protection for her photo and video library, Great American Novel,  or
 whatever. Time Machine is a good first step (though it doesn't  often work
 smoothly for me with a LaCie external FW drive).

 These are the neglected pieces, IMHO, of their touted Digital Lifestyle.

 --Toby


 or just having some wine and music?

 Can we focus on commercial usage?
 please!



 - Original Message -
 From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: Brandon High bh...@freaks.com
 Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:28 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Brandon High bh...@freaks.com  wrote:

 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com
 wrote:

 How much is your time worth?

 Quite a bit.

 Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
 Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
 You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.

 A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home
 for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another
 box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were  around
 $200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200.

 I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere  near
 $1200. The X4200 uses 2.5 drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding
 more drives ups the cost further. That means the afternoon I spent
 setting my server up was worth $3000. I should tell my boss that.

 A more reasonable comparison would be the Ultra 24. A system with
 4x250 drives is $1650. I could build a 4 TB system today for *less*
 than my 1TB system of 2 years ago, so let's use 3x750 + 1x250  drives.
 (That's all the store will let me) and the price jumps to $2641.

 Assume that I buy the cheapest x64 system (the X2100 M2 at $1228)  and
 add a drive tray because I want 4 drives ... well I can't. The
 cheapest drive tray is $7465.

 I have trouble justifying Sun hardware for many business  applications
 that don't require SPARC, let alone for the home. For custom systems
 that most tinkerers would want at home, a shop like Silicon  Mechanics
 (http://www.siliconmechanics.com/) (or even Dell or HP) is almost
 always a better deal on hardware.

 I agree completely.  About a year ago I spent around $800 (w/o  drives)
 on a NAS box for home.  I used a 4x PCI-X single-Xeon Supermicro  MB, a
 giant case, and a single 8-port Supermicro SATA card.  Then I dropped
 a pair of 80 GB boot drives and 9x 500 GB drives into it.  With  raidz2
 plus a spare, that gives me around 2.7T of usable space.  When I
 filled that up a few weeks back, I bought 2 more 8-port SATA cards, 2
 Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-drive hot

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread JZ
Thanks Scott,
I was really itchy to order one, now I just want to save that open $ for 
Remy+++.

Then, next question, can I trust any HD for my home laptop? should I go get 
a Sony VAIO or a cheap China-made thing would do?
big price delta...

z at home

- Original Message - 
From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
Cc: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au; Brandon High 
bh...@freaks.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn 
peter.k...@sun.com; Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:36 PM
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Today?  Low-power SSDs are probably less reliable than low-power hard
 drives, although they're too new to really know for certain.  Given
 the number of problems that vendors have had getting acceptable write
 speeds, I'd be really amazed if they've done any real work on
 long-term reliability yet.  Going forward, SSDs will almost certainly
 be more reliable, as long as you have something SMART-ish watching the
 number of worn-out SSD cells and recommending preemptive replacement
 of worn-out drives every few years.  That should be a slow,
 predictable process, unlike most HD failures.


 Scott

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:30 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:
 I was think about Apple's new SSD drive option on laptops...

 is that safer than Apple's HD or less safe? [maybe Orvar can help me on
 this]

 the price is a bit hefty for me to just order for experiment...
 Thanks!
 z at home


 - Original Message - From: Toby Thain 
 t...@telegraphics.com.au
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org; Brandon High bh...@freaks.com;
 zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:25 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?



 On 7-Jan-09, at 9:43 PM, JZ wrote:

 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing  on
 you.

 But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented  not
 for
 home use?

 Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home,

 Why would you disrespect your personal data? ZFS is perfect for home 
 use,
 for reasons that have been discussed on this list and elsewhere.

 Apple also recognises this, which is why ZFS is in OS X 10.5 and will
 presumably become the default boot filesystem.

 Sorry to wander a little offtopic, but IMHO - Apple needs to 
 acknowledge,
 and tell their customers, that hard drives are  unreliable consumables.

 I am desperately looking forward to the day when they recognise the 
 need
 to ship all their systems with:
 1) mirrored storage out of the box;
 2) easy user-swappable drives;
 3) foolproof fault notification and rectification.

 There is no reason why an Apple customer should not have this level  of
 protection for her photo and video library, Great American Novel,  or
 whatever. Time Machine is a good first step (though it doesn't  often 
 work
 smoothly for me with a LaCie external FW drive).

 These are the neglected pieces, IMHO, of their touted Digital Lifestyle.

 --Toby


 or just having some wine and music?

 Can we focus on commercial usage?
 please!



 - Original Message -
 From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: Brandon High bh...@freaks.com
 Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:28 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Brandon High bh...@freaks.com 
 wrote:

 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com
 wrote:

 How much is your time worth?

 Quite a bit.

 Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
 Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
 You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.

 A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home
 for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another
 box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were 
 around
 $200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200.

 I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere 
 near
 $1200. The X4200 uses 2.5 drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding
 more drives ups the cost further. That means the afternoon I spent
 setting my server up was worth $3000. I should tell my boss that.

 A more reasonable comparison would be the Ultra 24. A system with
 4x250 drives is $1650. I could build a 4 TB system today for *less*
 than my 1TB system of 2 years ago, so let's use 3x750 + 1x250 
 drives.
 (That's all the store will let me) and the price jumps to $2641.

 Assume that I buy the cheapest x64 system (the X2100 M2 at $1228) 
 and
 add a drive tray because I want 4 drives ... well I can't. The
 cheapest drive tray is $7465.

 I have trouble justifying Sun hardware for many business 
 applications
 that don't require SPARC, let alone

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread JZ
Scott??
I am really at a major cross-point in my decision making process --

until today, all my home stuff are Sony,
from TV, projector, stereo bricks, all the way to USB SSD sticks.
[besides speakers I use Bose]

but this laptop thing is really bothering my religious love for Sony.
should I or should I not...  OMG!

???!

z, at home don't know how to spend $



- Original Message - 
From: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
To: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
Cc: Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com; 
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:40 PM
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Thanks Scott,
 I was really itchy to order one, now I just want to save that open $ for
 Remy+++.

 Then, next question, can I trust any HD for my home laptop? should I go 
 get
 a Sony VAIO or a cheap China-made thing would do?
 big price delta...

 z at home

 - Original Message - 
 From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au; Brandon High
 bh...@freaks.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn
 peter.k...@sun.com; Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:36 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Today?  Low-power SSDs are probably less reliable than low-power hard
 drives, although they're too new to really know for certain.  Given
 the number of problems that vendors have had getting acceptable write
 speeds, I'd be really amazed if they've done any real work on
 long-term reliability yet.  Going forward, SSDs will almost certainly
 be more reliable, as long as you have something SMART-ish watching the
 number of worn-out SSD cells and recommending preemptive replacement
 of worn-out drives every few years.  That should be a slow,
 predictable process, unlike most HD failures.


 Scott

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:30 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:
 I was think about Apple's new SSD drive option on laptops...

 is that safer than Apple's HD or less safe? [maybe Orvar can help me on
 this]

 the price is a bit hefty for me to just order for experiment...
 Thanks!
 z at home


 - Original Message - From: Toby Thain
 t...@telegraphics.com.au
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org; Brandon High 
 bh...@freaks.com;
 zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:25 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?



 On 7-Jan-09, at 9:43 PM, JZ wrote:

 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing 
 on
 you.

 But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented  not
 for
 home use?

 Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home,

 Why would you disrespect your personal data? ZFS is perfect for home
 use,
 for reasons that have been discussed on this list and elsewhere.

 Apple also recognises this, which is why ZFS is in OS X 10.5 and will
 presumably become the default boot filesystem.

 Sorry to wander a little offtopic, but IMHO - Apple needs to
 acknowledge,
 and tell their customers, that hard drives are  unreliable consumables.

 I am desperately looking forward to the day when they recognise the
 need
 to ship all their systems with:
 1) mirrored storage out of the box;
 2) easy user-swappable drives;
 3) foolproof fault notification and rectification.

 There is no reason why an Apple customer should not have this level  of
 protection for her photo and video library, Great American Novel,  or
 whatever. Time Machine is a good first step (though it doesn't  often
 work
 smoothly for me with a LaCie external FW drive).

 These are the neglected pieces, IMHO, of their touted Digital 
 Lifestyle.

 --Toby


 or just having some wine and music?

 Can we focus on commercial usage?
 please!



 - Original Message -
 From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: Brandon High bh...@freaks.com
 Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:28 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Brandon High bh...@freaks.com
 wrote:

 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com
 wrote:

 How much is your time worth?

 Quite a bit.

 Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
 Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
 You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.

 A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home
 for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another
 box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were
 around
 $200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200.

 I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere
 near
 $1200. The X4200 uses 2.5 drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding
 more

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread Scott Laird
You can't trust any hard drive.  That's what backups are for :-).

Laptop hard drives aren't much worse than desktop drives, and 2.5
SATA drives are cheap.  As long as they're easy to swap, then a drive
failure isn't the end of the world.  Order a new drive ($100 or so),
swap them, and restore from backup.

I haven't dealt with PC laptops in years, so I can't really compare models.


Scott

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:40 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:
 Thanks Scott,
 I was really itchy to order one, now I just want to save that open $ for
 Remy+++.

 Then, next question, can I trust any HD for my home laptop? should I go get
 a Sony VAIO or a cheap China-made thing would do?
 big price delta...

 z at home

 - Original Message - From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au; Brandon High
 bh...@freaks.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn
 peter.k...@sun.com; Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:36 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Today?  Low-power SSDs are probably less reliable than low-power hard
 drives, although they're too new to really know for certain.  Given
 the number of problems that vendors have had getting acceptable write
 speeds, I'd be really amazed if they've done any real work on
 long-term reliability yet.  Going forward, SSDs will almost certainly
 be more reliable, as long as you have something SMART-ish watching the
 number of worn-out SSD cells and recommending preemptive replacement
 of worn-out drives every few years.  That should be a slow,
 predictable process, unlike most HD failures.


 Scott

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:30 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:

 I was think about Apple's new SSD drive option on laptops...

 is that safer than Apple's HD or less safe? [maybe Orvar can help me on
 this]

 the price is a bit hefty for me to just order for experiment...
 Thanks!
 z at home


 - Original Message - From: Toby Thain
 t...@telegraphics.com.au
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org; Brandon High bh...@freaks.com;
 zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:25 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?



 On 7-Jan-09, at 9:43 PM, JZ wrote:

 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing  on
 you.

 But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented  not
 for
 home use?

 Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home,

 Why would you disrespect your personal data? ZFS is perfect for home
 use,
 for reasons that have been discussed on this list and elsewhere.

 Apple also recognises this, which is why ZFS is in OS X 10.5 and will
 presumably become the default boot filesystem.

 Sorry to wander a little offtopic, but IMHO - Apple needs to
 acknowledge,
 and tell their customers, that hard drives are  unreliable consumables.

 I am desperately looking forward to the day when they recognise the need
 to ship all their systems with:
 1) mirrored storage out of the box;
 2) easy user-swappable drives;
 3) foolproof fault notification and rectification.

 There is no reason why an Apple customer should not have this level  of
 protection for her photo and video library, Great American Novel,  or
 whatever. Time Machine is a good first step (though it doesn't  often
 work
 smoothly for me with a LaCie external FW drive).

 These are the neglected pieces, IMHO, of their touted Digital Lifestyle.

 --Toby


 or just having some wine and music?

 Can we focus on commercial usage?
 please!



 - Original Message -
 From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: Brandon High bh...@freaks.com
 Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:28 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Brandon High bh...@freaks.com wrote:

 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com
 wrote:

 How much is your time worth?

 Quite a bit.

 Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
 Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
 You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.

 A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home
 for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another
 box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were
 around
 $200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200.

 I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere near
 $1200. The X4200 uses 2.5 drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding
 more drives ups the cost further. That means the afternoon I spent
 setting my server up was worth $3000. I should tell my boss that.

 A more reasonable comparison would be the Ultra 24. A system with
 4x250 drives is $1650. I could

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread JZ
Thanks much Scott,
I still don't know what you are talking about -- my $3000 to $800 laptops 
all never needed to swap any drive.

But yeah, I got hit on all of them when I was in china, by the china web 
virus that no U.S. software could do anything [then a china open source 
thing did the job]

So, without the swapping HD concern, what should I do???

z at home still confused


- Original Message - 
From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
Cc: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au; Brandon High 
bh...@freaks.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn 
peter.k...@sun.com; Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 6:20 PM
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 You can't trust any hard drive.  That's what backups are for :-).

 Laptop hard drives aren't much worse than desktop drives, and 2.5
 SATA drives are cheap.  As long as they're easy to swap, then a drive
 failure isn't the end of the world.  Order a new drive ($100 or so),
 swap them, and restore from backup.

 I haven't dealt with PC laptops in years, so I can't really compare 
 models.


 Scott

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:40 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:
 Thanks Scott,
 I was really itchy to order one, now I just want to save that open $ for
 Remy+++.

 Then, next question, can I trust any HD for my home laptop? should I go 
 get
 a Sony VAIO or a cheap China-made thing would do?
 big price delta...

 z at home

 - Original Message - From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au; Brandon High
 bh...@freaks.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn
 peter.k...@sun.com; Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:36 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Today?  Low-power SSDs are probably less reliable than low-power hard
 drives, although they're too new to really know for certain.  Given
 the number of problems that vendors have had getting acceptable write
 speeds, I'd be really amazed if they've done any real work on
 long-term reliability yet.  Going forward, SSDs will almost certainly
 be more reliable, as long as you have something SMART-ish watching the
 number of worn-out SSD cells and recommending preemptive replacement
 of worn-out drives every few years.  That should be a slow,
 predictable process, unlike most HD failures.


 Scott

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:30 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:

 I was think about Apple's new SSD drive option on laptops...

 is that safer than Apple's HD or less safe? [maybe Orvar can help me on
 this]

 the price is a bit hefty for me to just order for experiment...
 Thanks!
 z at home


 - Original Message - From: Toby Thain
 t...@telegraphics.com.au
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org; Brandon High 
 bh...@freaks.com;
 zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:25 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?



 On 7-Jan-09, at 9:43 PM, JZ wrote:

 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing 
 on
 you.

 But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented 
 not
 for
 home use?

 Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home,

 Why would you disrespect your personal data? ZFS is perfect for home
 use,
 for reasons that have been discussed on this list and elsewhere.

 Apple also recognises this, which is why ZFS is in OS X 10.5 and will
 presumably become the default boot filesystem.

 Sorry to wander a little offtopic, but IMHO - Apple needs to
 acknowledge,
 and tell their customers, that hard drives are  unreliable 
 consumables.

 I am desperately looking forward to the day when they recognise the 
 need
 to ship all their systems with:
 1) mirrored storage out of the box;
 2) easy user-swappable drives;
 3) foolproof fault notification and rectification.

 There is no reason why an Apple customer should not have this level 
 of
 protection for her photo and video library, Great American Novel,  or
 whatever. Time Machine is a good first step (though it doesn't  often
 work
 smoothly for me with a LaCie external FW drive).

 These are the neglected pieces, IMHO, of their touted Digital 
 Lifestyle.

 --Toby


 or just having some wine and music?

 Can we focus on commercial usage?
 please!



 - Original Message -
 From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: Brandon High bh...@freaks.com
 Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:28 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Brandon High bh...@freaks.com 
 wrote:

 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com
 wrote:

 How much is your time worth?

 Quite a bit.

 Consider the engineering effort going

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread The Moog
Are you planning to run Solaris on your laptop?

Sent from my BlackBerry Bold® 
http://www.blackberrybold.com

-Original Message-
From: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com

Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2009 18:27:52 
To: Scott Lairdsc...@sigkill.org
Cc: Orvar Korvarknatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com; 
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Kornpeter.k...@sun.com
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


Thanks much Scott,
I still don't know what you are talking about -- my $3000 to $800 laptops 
all never needed to swap any drive.

But yeah, I got hit on all of them when I was in china, by the china web 
virus that no U.S. software could do anything [then a china open source 
thing did the job]

So, without the swapping HD concern, what should I do???

z at home still confused


- Original Message - 
From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
Cc: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au; Brandon High 
bh...@freaks.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn 
peter.k...@sun.com; Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 6:20 PM
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 You can't trust any hard drive.  That's what backups are for :-).

 Laptop hard drives aren't much worse than desktop drives, and 2.5
 SATA drives are cheap.  As long as they're easy to swap, then a drive
 failure isn't the end of the world.  Order a new drive ($100 or so),
 swap them, and restore from backup.

 I haven't dealt with PC laptops in years, so I can't really compare 
 models.


 Scott

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:40 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:
 Thanks Scott,
 I was really itchy to order one, now I just want to save that open $ for
 Remy+++.

 Then, next question, can I trust any HD for my home laptop? should I go 
 get
 a Sony VAIO or a cheap China-made thing would do?
 big price delta...

 z at home

 - Original Message - From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au; Brandon High
 bh...@freaks.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn
 peter.k...@sun.com; Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:36 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Today?  Low-power SSDs are probably less reliable than low-power hard
 drives, although they're too new to really know for certain.  Given
 the number of problems that vendors have had getting acceptable write
 speeds, I'd be really amazed if they've done any real work on
 long-term reliability yet.  Going forward, SSDs will almost certainly
 be more reliable, as long as you have something SMART-ish watching the
 number of worn-out SSD cells and recommending preemptive replacement
 of worn-out drives every few years.  That should be a slow,
 predictable process, unlike most HD failures.


 Scott

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:30 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:

 I was think about Apple's new SSD drive option on laptops...

 is that safer than Apple's HD or less safe? [maybe Orvar can help me on
 this]

 the price is a bit hefty for me to just order for experiment...
 Thanks!
 z at home


 - Original Message - From: Toby Thain
 t...@telegraphics.com.au
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org; Brandon High 
 bh...@freaks.com;
 zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:25 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?



 On 7-Jan-09, at 9:43 PM, JZ wrote:

 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing 
 on
 you.

 But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented 
 not
 for
 home use?

 Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home,

 Why would you disrespect your personal data? ZFS is perfect for home
 use,
 for reasons that have been discussed on this list and elsewhere.

 Apple also recognises this, which is why ZFS is in OS X 10.5 and will
 presumably become the default boot filesystem.

 Sorry to wander a little offtopic, but IMHO - Apple needs to
 acknowledge,
 and tell their customers, that hard drives are  unreliable 
 consumables.

 I am desperately looking forward to the day when they recognise the 
 need
 to ship all their systems with:
 1) mirrored storage out of the box;
 2) easy user-swappable drives;
 3) foolproof fault notification and rectification.

 There is no reason why an Apple customer should not have this level 
 of
 protection for her photo and video library, Great American Novel,  or
 whatever. Time Machine is a good first step (though it doesn't  often
 work
 smoothly for me with a LaCie external FW drive).

 These are the neglected pieces, IMHO, of their touted Digital 
 Lifestyle.

 --Toby


 or just having some wine and music?

 Can we focus on commercial usage?
 please!



 - Original Message -
 From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: Brandon High bh

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread JZ
OMG!
what a critical factor I just didn't think about!!!
stupid me!

Moog, please, which laptops are supporting ZFS today?
I will only buy within those.

z, at home, feeling better, but still a bit confused


- Original Message - 
From: The Moog m...@pixelshift.com
To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com; 
zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org; Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
Cc: Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com; 
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 6:50 PM
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Are you planning to run Solaris on your laptop?

 Sent from my BlackBerry Bold®
 http://www.blackberrybold.com

 -Original Message-
 From: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com

 Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2009 18:27:52
 To: Scott Lairdsc...@sigkill.org
 Cc: Orvar Korvarknatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com; 
 zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Kornpeter.k...@sun.com
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Thanks much Scott,
 I still don't know what you are talking about -- my $3000 to $800 laptops
 all never needed to swap any drive.

 But yeah, I got hit on all of them when I was in china, by the china web
 virus that no U.S. software could do anything [then a china open source
 thing did the job]

 So, without the swapping HD concern, what should I do???

 z at home still confused


 - Original Message - 
 From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au; Brandon High
 bh...@freaks.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn
 peter.k...@sun.com; Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 6:20 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 You can't trust any hard drive.  That's what backups are for :-).

 Laptop hard drives aren't much worse than desktop drives, and 2.5
 SATA drives are cheap.  As long as they're easy to swap, then a drive
 failure isn't the end of the world.  Order a new drive ($100 or so),
 swap them, and restore from backup.

 I haven't dealt with PC laptops in years, so I can't really compare
 models.


 Scott

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:40 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:
 Thanks Scott,
 I was really itchy to order one, now I just want to save that open $ for
 Remy+++.

 Then, next question, can I trust any HD for my home laptop? should I go
 get
 a Sony VAIO or a cheap China-made thing would do?
 big price delta...

 z at home

 - Original Message - From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Toby Thain t...@telegraphics.com.au; Brandon High
 bh...@freaks.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn
 peter.k...@sun.com; Orvar Korvar knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:36 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Today?  Low-power SSDs are probably less reliable than low-power hard
 drives, although they're too new to really know for certain.  Given
 the number of problems that vendors have had getting acceptable write
 speeds, I'd be really amazed if they've done any real work on
 long-term reliability yet.  Going forward, SSDs will almost certainly
 be more reliable, as long as you have something SMART-ish watching the
 number of worn-out SSD cells and recommending preemptive replacement
 of worn-out drives every few years.  That should be a slow,
 predictable process, unlike most HD failures.


 Scott

 On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 2:30 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:

 I was think about Apple's new SSD drive option on laptops...

 is that safer than Apple's HD or less safe? [maybe Orvar can help me 
 on
 this]

 the price is a bit hefty for me to just order for experiment...
 Thanks!
 z at home


 - Original Message - From: Toby Thain
 t...@telegraphics.com.au
 To: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com
 Cc: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org; Brandon High
 bh...@freaks.com;
 zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
 Sent: Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:25 PM
 Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?



 On 7-Jan-09, at 9:43 PM, JZ wrote:

 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing
 on
 you.

 But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented
 not
 for
 home use?

 Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home,

 Why would you disrespect your personal data? ZFS is perfect for home
 use,
 for reasons that have been discussed on this list and elsewhere.

 Apple also recognises this, which is why ZFS is in OS X 10.5 and will
 presumably become the default boot filesystem.

 Sorry to wander a little offtopic, but IMHO - Apple needs to
 acknowledge,
 and tell their customers, that hard drives are  unreliable
 consumables.

 I am desperately looking forward to the day when they recognise the
 need
 to ship all their systems with:
 1) mirrored storage out of the box;
 2) easy user-swappable

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread Richard Elling
Scott Laird wrote:
 Today?  Low-power SSDs are probably less reliable than low-power hard
 drives, although they're too new to really know for certain.  Given
 the number of problems that vendors have had getting acceptable write
 speeds, I'd be really amazed if they've done any real work on
 long-term reliability yet.  

Eh?  Flash has been around for well over 25 years and the
technology is well understood.  Trivia: Sun has been shipping
flash memory for nearly its entire history.  What hasn't happened
until relatively recently is that the vendors married high density
flash with a decent controller which expects and manages failures --
like the disk drive guys did 20 years ago.  It occurs to me that
you might be too young to remember that format(1m) was the
tool used to do media analysis and map bad sectors before those
smarts were moved onto the disk ? ;-)  Why, we used to have to
regularly scan the media, reserve spare cylinders, and map out
bad sectors in the snow, walking uphill, in our bare feet because
shoes hadn't been invented yet... ;-)

 Going forward, SSDs will almost certainly
 be more reliable, as long as you have something SMART-ish watching the
 number of worn-out SSD cells and recommending preemptive replacement
 of worn-out drives every few years.  That should be a slow,
 predictable process, unlike most HD failures.
   

I think you will find that failures can still be catastrophic.
But from a typical reliability analysis, the SSDs will be more
reliable than HDDs.  The enterprise SSDs have DRAM
front-ends and plenty of spare cells to accommodate expected
enterprise use.  FWIW, I expect an MTBF of 3-4M hours for
enterprise SSDs as compared to 1.6M hours for a top-tier
enterprise HDD.  More worrying is the relative newness of the
firmware... but software reliability is a whole different ballgame.

Rumor was that STEC won one of the Apple contracts
http://webfeet.sp360hosting.com/Lists/Research%20News/DispForm.aspx?ID=32
STEC also supplies Sun and EMC. But the competition is
really heating up with Intel and Samsung having made several
recent announcements.  We do live in interesting times :-)
 -- richard

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zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss


Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-08 Thread JZ
OMG, Rich, that did help and solved all my confusion and now I can go to 
sleep...

So now I have to consider Sun and EMC vs Intel in my home $ spending?!
Forget it, Lenovo it is!
at least my folks get a cut.

Goodnight!
best,
z


- Original Message - 
From: Richard Elling richard.ell...@sun.com
To: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
Cc: JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com; Orvar Korvar 
knatte_fnatte_tja...@yahoo.com; zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter 
Korn peter.k...@sun.com
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2009 1:09 AM
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 Scott Laird wrote:
 Today?  Low-power SSDs are probably less reliable than low-power hard
 drives, although they're too new to really know for certain.  Given
 the number of problems that vendors have had getting acceptable write
 speeds, I'd be really amazed if they've done any real work on
 long-term reliability yet.

 Eh?  Flash has been around for well over 25 years and the
 technology is well understood.  Trivia: Sun has been shipping
 flash memory for nearly its entire history.  What hasn't happened
 until relatively recently is that the vendors married high density
 flash with a decent controller which expects and manages failures --
 like the disk drive guys did 20 years ago.  It occurs to me that
 you might be too young to remember that format(1m) was the
 tool used to do media analysis and map bad sectors before those
 smarts were moved onto the disk ? ;-)  Why, we used to have to
 regularly scan the media, reserve spare cylinders, and map out
 bad sectors in the snow, walking uphill, in our bare feet because
 shoes hadn't been invented yet... ;-)

 Going forward, SSDs will almost certainly
 be more reliable, as long as you have something SMART-ish watching the
 number of worn-out SSD cells and recommending preemptive replacement
 of worn-out drives every few years.  That should be a slow,
 predictable process, unlike most HD failures.


 I think you will find that failures can still be catastrophic.
 But from a typical reliability analysis, the SSDs will be more
 reliable than HDDs.  The enterprise SSDs have DRAM
 front-ends and plenty of spare cells to accommodate expected
 enterprise use.  FWIW, I expect an MTBF of 3-4M hours for
 enterprise SSDs as compared to 1.6M hours for a top-tier
 enterprise HDD.  More worrying is the relative newness of the
 firmware... but software reliability is a whole different ballgame.

 Rumor was that STEC won one of the Apple contracts
 http://webfeet.sp360hosting.com/Lists/Research%20News/DispForm.aspx?ID=32
 STEC also supplies Sun and EMC. But the competition is
 really heating up with Intel and Samsung having made several
 recent announcements.  We do live in interesting times :-)
 -- richard
 

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zfs-discuss mailing list
zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread Peter Korn
I'm looking to do the same thing - home NAS with ZFS.

I'm debating several routes/options, and I'd appreciate opinions from folks 
here.

My system will primarily be a file  music server, serving CIFS and some NFS as 
well as driving multiple concurrent audio streams via SqueezeCenter, and 
perhaps eventually videos via something like MythTV.  I'm also contemplating 
making it a Sun Ray server.  I don't want to run out of disk space for a long 
time - I'd like = 3TB to start.

Decision #1: AMD vs. Intel
I'm drawn to quad core, perhaps for silly reasons.  I'm also drawn to AMD (for 
price and RAM performance).  And finally I'm drawn to ASUS motherboards because 
there are so many options in the HCL.  I want lots of SATA ports and support 
for 8GB RAM
 - option a: ASUS M3A-H/HDMI ($...@newegg) with AMD Phenom 9600 ($...@newegg)
 - option b: ASUS P5K Deluxe ($...@newegg) with Intel Quad Q6600 ($...@newegg)
Any reason to go with Intel?  Any better option going the AMD route (perhaps 
the Quad core chip offers no value?) 

Decision #2: 1.5TB Seagate vs. 1TB WD (or someone else)
I've heard lots of stories about Seagate reliability being poor, especially in 
RAID configurations.  WD has a good reputation, especially with their more 
expensive E3 drives.  Reliability is a concern both from a time point of view 
(spending time getting/installing replacements and downtime until it is in), as 
well as potential data reliability if a multiple-failure occurs.
 - option a: 3 1.5TB Seagate drives (in Raid-Z) or 4 1.5TB in Raid-Z2 
($...@newegg)
 - option b: 4 1TB WD drives (in Raid-Z) or 5 in Raid-Z2
  - option b(1): WD RE3 drives ($150 via eBay seller)
  - option b(2): WD Caviar Black ($...@newegg)
  - option b(3): WD Caviar Green ($...@newegg)
Do I loose much in performance going Green vs. Black?  Do I gain anything in 
reliability?  Anything measurable (given other system components) in power 
savings?

Decision #3: Raid-Z vs. Raid-Z2
I understand that with very large drives, the chance of a momentary block read 
failure is near (or in excess) of the 1/# blocks on disk (so you would likely 
get one of these if reading/copying the entire 1-1.5TB), and while subsequent 
re-tries would fix this it would be seen as a RAID failure in the moment.  But 
the more I read up on ZFS, the less likely a double-fault situation appears 
that it'd occur, given the fix-on-error-detection and continuous cleaning of 
the disk.
 - option a: Raid-Z
 - option b: Raid-Z2

Decision #4: file system layout
I'd like to have ZFS root mirrored.  Do we simply use a portion of the existing 
disks for this, or add two disks just for root?  Use USB-2 flash as those 2 
disks?  And where does swap go?  
 - option a: [3 disks]
  - option a(1): reserve ~50GB from all three, ZFS mirror across all three, and 
put swap into that 50GB
  - option a(2): reserve ~50GB from all three, ZFS mirror across first two, and 
put swap into the third 50GB (rather large that...)
  - option a(3): reserve ~50GB from all three, ZFS mirror across first two, and 
put swap into that 50GB; ignore the 50GB in the third

 - option b: [4 disks]
  - option b(1): reserve ~25GB from all four, ZFS pool/mirror across all four, 
and put swap into that pooled 50GB
  - option b(2): reserve ~50GB from all four, ZFS mirror across first two, and 
put swap into the third 50GB (rather large that...) and ignore the fourth 50GB
  - option b(3): reserve ~50GB from all four, ZFS mirror across first two, and 
put swap into the third 50GB (rather large that...) and ignore the fourth 50GB
  - option b(4): reserve ~50GB from all four, ZFS mirror across first two, and 
put swap into that 50GB (rather large that...); ignore the third and fourth 50GB

 - option c: [5 disks]
  - option c(n): you get the idea...

 - option d: [n disks + 2 root disks]
  - option d(1) use some small cheap pair of SATA (or even IDE) disks for 
mirrored root/swap
  - option d(2) use ~8GB USB2 flash drives for mirrored root/swap (and place 
things like /opt into the larger data array)


Many thanks for your feedback!

Peter
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread Joel Buckley
Dude,

How much is your time worth?

Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.

Search http://store.sun.com; for the item that matches your
needs and run with it.  Sun currently has a promotion on X4150
Servers...  That will easily be able to serve NFS, SunRay,
etc... to your home.

I believe when you factor in all the hardware (motherboard,
cpu, memory, disks, cabling, power supply, case, etc.) and
all your time (installation, testing, debugging, testing, hardware
DOAs, testing, waiting for replacements, testing,
repairing/replacing faulty consumer grade drives, testing...),
I think you will quickly find the current X4150 server to be
a compelling deal.

I currently own/use an X2100 server for the same purpose
without issues.

Cheers,
Joel.
Proud to be Flying Our Own Dog Food ;-)

Decision #1: Buy an engineered box.

http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4150/
http://shop.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/Sun_NorthAmerica-Sun_Store_US-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewStandardCatalog-Browse?CategoryName=HID-2133736376CategoryDomainName=Sun_NorthAmerica-Sun_Store_US-SunCatalog

* Quad-Core Intel, 4GB RAM ... Promotional Priced... $2035.

Get a real/tested box.  Forget the hassles.

Decision #2:

* With disks, you get what you pay for  What does Sun use...
* Be careful at/beyond 1TB for Boot Drives

Decision #3:

* What is your data production requirements?
* Keep in mind RAID-Z2 with 3 disks is essentially 3way mirror...
* Have you considered Mirrored?
* How many disks are you planning on having in the system?
* Performance, Space, Protection: Choose 2.

Decision #4:

* See Decision #3, above.

Cheers,
Joel.

On 01/07/09 03:29, Peter Korn wrote:
 I'm looking to do the same thing - home NAS with ZFS.

 I'm debating several routes/options, and I'd appreciate opinions from folks 
 here.

 My system will primarily be a file  music server, serving CIFS and some NFS 
 as well as driving multiple concurrent audio streams via SqueezeCenter, and 
 perhaps eventually videos via something like MythTV.  I'm also contemplating 
 making it a Sun Ray server.  I don't want to run out of disk space for a long 
 time - I'd like = 3TB to start.

 Decision #1: AMD vs. Intel
 I'm drawn to quad core, perhaps for silly reasons.  I'm also drawn to AMD 
 (for price and RAM performance).  And finally I'm drawn to ASUS motherboards 
 because there are so many options in the HCL.  I want lots of SATA ports and 
 support for 8GB RAM
  - option a: ASUS M3A-H/HDMI ($...@newegg) with AMD Phenom 9600 ($...@newegg)
  - option b: ASUS P5K Deluxe ($...@newegg) with Intel Quad Q6600 ($...@newegg)
 Any reason to go with Intel?  Any better option going the AMD route (perhaps 
 the Quad core chip offers no value?) 

 Decision #2: 1.5TB Seagate vs. 1TB WD (or someone else)
 I've heard lots of stories about Seagate reliability being poor, especially 
 in RAID configurations.  WD has a good reputation, especially with their more 
 expensive E3 drives.  Reliability is a concern both from a time point of view 
 (spending time getting/installing replacements and downtime until it is in), 
 as well as potential data reliability if a multiple-failure occurs.
  - option a: 3 1.5TB Seagate drives (in Raid-Z) or 4 1.5TB in Raid-Z2 
 ($...@newegg)
  - option b: 4 1TB WD drives (in Raid-Z) or 5 in Raid-Z2
   - option b(1): WD RE3 drives ($150 via eBay seller)
   - option b(2): WD Caviar Black ($...@newegg)
   - option b(3): WD Caviar Green ($...@newegg)
 Do I loose much in performance going Green vs. Black?  Do I gain anything in 
 reliability?  Anything measurable (given other system components) in power 
 savings?

 Decision #3: Raid-Z vs. Raid-Z2
 I understand that with very large drives, the chance of a momentary block 
 read failure is near (or in excess) of the 1/# blocks on disk (so you would 
 likely get one of these if reading/copying the entire 1-1.5TB), and while 
 subsequent re-tries would fix this it would be seen as a RAID failure in the 
 moment.  But the more I read up on ZFS, the less likely a double-fault 
 situation appears that it'd occur, given the fix-on-error-detection and 
 continuous cleaning of the disk.
  - option a: Raid-Z
  - option b: Raid-Z2

 Decision #4: file system layout
 I'd like to have ZFS root mirrored.  Do we simply use a portion of the 
 existing disks for this, or add two disks just for root?  Use USB-2 flash as 
 those 2 disks?  And where does swap go?  
  - option a: [3 disks]
   - option a(1): reserve ~50GB from all three, ZFS mirror across all three, 
 and put swap into that 50GB
   - option a(2): reserve ~50GB from all three, ZFS mirror across first two, 
 and put swap into the third 50GB (rather large that...)
   - option a(3): reserve ~50GB from all three, ZFS mirror across first two, 
 and put swap into that 50GB; ignore the 50GB in the third

  - option b: [4 disks]
   - 

Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread David Dyer-Bennet


On Wed, January 7, 2009 04:29, Peter Korn wrote:

 Decision #4: file system layout
 I'd like to have ZFS root mirrored.  Do we simply use a portion of the
existing disks for this, or add two disks just for root?  Use USB-2
flash as those 2 disks?  And where does swap go?

The default install in Osol 0811 (which is what I just upgraded my home
NAS to) gives you a zfs root pool that various things, including swap, are
taken out of as filesystems or whatever.  (You can then attach another
chunk of space to make that root pool mirrored, if you want; I've done
that, using two dedicated disks for it.)

Actually, I don't think you can really control how the 08-11 install sets
up its root.

Because of the cost of hot-swap slots in a box, it might make sense to
share root and data on two drives, maybe.  I haven't gone that route
myself.

I haven't experimented with SSD in Solaris.  I'm using one as the system
drive for an XP box, and it's giving me terrible pause problems (I think
this is an understood problem, I just bought too early, and haven't been
able to afford to junk my current SSD and replace it with an even more
expensive one).  So make sure to get current research and figure out which
ones will be good for what  you're doing before spending money!

What are your backup plans?  RAID (or mirroring) is just the start, to
protect you from many hardware issues.  (The size of your array makes this
more of an issue; mine is two 400GB mirrored pairs, so I can back it up to
an external 1TB drive easily.)

-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info



-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread Will Murnane
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 10:45, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com wrote:
 Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
 Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
 You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.
In my experience, buying disks (or disk-related things---JBODs, NASs,
etc.) from Sun is frustratingly expensive.  Sure, the x4150 linked
later is a good deal (if you don't mind spending a couple grand on a
home system), but it only takes 2.5 drives inside it.  Even with
146GB SAS drives (the largest bundled with it) 8 drives doesn't give
3TB.  So, you need an external SAS or SCSI card at $500, and a place
to put more (preferably 3.5) disks.  Follow, if you will, the trek of
someone attempting to do that at home.

Let's see... Sun.com, storage, find a product.  Disk storage, that's
right.  Ah!  The J4200 looks like just the thing.  I want it with 4
1TB disks, so pick the model that includes 2 and add 2 more.  Throw in
a SAS cable so I can attach this to the x4150.  Now take a look at the
price... $5600.  Add the host and the SAS card and the total is $8100
for a lousy 3 TB of disk space.

I can't (for home use) warrant spending $8k for a
 file  music server
, I don't care how well-tested it is, I can buy eight different kinds
of hardware with 3TB of disk space for that, and I'd wager at least
three of them would work out of the box, and then I'd have more
available disk space than the Sun solution.  For small enterprises
like a home media box, I don't see the point of big, expensive, loud
(!) machines like the x4150 et al.

 Decision #2: 1.5TB Seagate vs. 1TB WD (or someone else)
The 1.5TB drives have a sketchy reputation as compared to any other
Seagate drives.  The rumor is that reliability was not high enough for
the OEMs to carry them, so that's why they're so cheap.  I have a
thrown-together interface [1] that gets prices for drives from several
online stores, and lets you sort by price, size, or price per
gigabyte.  The Samsung HD103UJ drives are nice, if you're not using
NVidia controllers - there's a bug in either the drives or the
controllers that makes them drop drives fairly frequently.  They work
fine with other controllers, though; I'm using 4 of them with a
Marvell controller with no problems.

Will

[1]: http://will.incorrige.us/price-checker.cgi?sortby=costperGB
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread Tim
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Tim t...@tcsac.net wrote:




  Decision #2: 1.5TB Seagate vs. 1TB WD (or someone else)
 The 1.5TB drives have a sketchy reputation as compared to any other
 Seagate drives.  The rumor is that reliability was not high enough for
 the OEMs to carry them, so that's why they're so cheap.  I have a
 thrown-together interface [1] that gets prices for drives from several
 online stores, and lets you sort by price, size, or price per
 gigabyte.  The Samsung HD103UJ drives are nice, if you're not using
 NVidia controllers - there's a bug in either the drives or the
 controllers that makes them drop drives fairly frequently.  They work
 fine with other controllers, though; I'm using 4 of them with a
 Marvell controller with no problems.

 Will

 [1]: http://will.incorrige.us/price-checker.cgi?sortby=costperGB


 The 1.5TB drives had some firmware issues when they were first released.
 That would be why they were viewed as sketchy.  That has since been fixed
 and they're just as good as everything else.

 The reason they're so cheap is because they're the same 7200.11 form factor
 as the rest of the line-up so the cost difference to produce them (from what
 i understand) is negligible.  That, and there's some real competition in
 that industry, which is always nice :)

 --Tim

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread Chris Greer
So I have just finished building something similar to this...
I'm finally replacing my Pentium II 400Mhz fileserver!

My setup is:

Opensolaris 2008.11
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138117
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145184
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103255
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129025

(there is no power supply here I had one of those too)
I ended up paying $278 

The case and everything makes it super quiet, and it runs very cool.
Still have a power test to run and see but I'm guessing 125 - 150 watts.

I had hard drives available, and using a USB DVD/CD drive for installation
I am using 2 ATA drives mirrored for the root pool
I am using 6 500GB (hitachi) sata drives in raidz for data with the onboard 
interface.

The initial iozone test I ran, under ideal block sizes etc, I could sustain 
enough to saturate the 1GB interface.  Real world, I haven't been able to see 
what my real utilization is.

I use this mostly to store media (movies, mp3s, etc) which I play with a mythtv 
box (just using NFS as the share).
Also planning to use this as a backup server for the other machines in the house
(considering running Amanda at home for this)

I'm usually not doing heavy file I/O, so I've also put a virtual machine on 
here with virtual box for casual use for other stuff.
During the process I swapped the whole thing to ubuntu on a usb flash and ran 
the opensolaris fileserver as a VM with VMWare...but I ended up just not happy 
with that in the end.  The usb flash I had was OK, but it's not a hard drive.
With opensolaris, I can still play flash stuff from Hulu fullscreen in HD with 
the onboard video.  I've been trying to remember why I still need windows for a 
desktop and have been debating just killing that PC as well.

Most of the things that I used windows for (ripping a DVD, etc) can be done 
with a VM with virtualbox...it's slow, but it works.  I also don't re-encode 
video at all.
I don't know if mythtv will actually run on opensolaris...that would be cool if 
it did.

As far as a fileserver that has capacity to do other stuff, I'm very happy with 
this setup.

As for the person who suggested a Sun x4150.  Those are extremely loud because 
of the fans.  There is no way I could run one of those at my house because of 
that.  It was designed for a datacenter (and I have run them there).
-- 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread Volker A. Brandt
 The Samsung HD103UJ drives are nice, if you're not using
 NVidia controllers - there's a bug in either the drives or the
 controllers that makes them drop drives fairly frequently.

Do you happen to have more details about this problem?  Or some
pointers?


Thanks -- Volker
-- 

Volker A. Brandt  Consulting and Support for Sun Solaris
Brandt  Brandt Computer GmbH   WWW: http://www.bb-c.de/
Am Wiesenpfad 6, 53340 Meckenheim Email: v...@bb-c.de
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Bonn, HRB 10513  Schuhgröße: 45
Geschäftsführer: Rainer J. H. Brandt und Volker A. Brandt
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread Brandon High
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com wrote:
 How much is your time worth?

Quite a bit.

 Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
 Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
 You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.

A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home
for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another
box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were around
$200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200.

I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere near
$1200. The X4200 uses 2.5 drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding
more drives ups the cost further. That means the afternoon I spent
setting my server up was worth $3000. I should tell my boss that.

A more reasonable comparison would be the Ultra 24. A system with
4x250 drives is $1650. I could build a 4 TB system today for *less*
than my 1TB system of 2 years ago, so let's use 3x750 + 1x250 drives.
(That's all the store will let me) and the price jumps to $2641.

Assume that I buy the cheapest x64 system (the X2100 M2 at $1228) and
add a drive tray because I want 4 drives ... well I can't. The
cheapest drive tray is $7465.

I have trouble justifying Sun hardware for many business applications
that don't require SPARC, let alone for the home. For custom systems
that most tinkerers would want at home, a shop like Silicon Mechanics
(http://www.siliconmechanics.com/) (or even Dell or HP) is almost
always a better deal on hardware.

-B

-- 
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread JZ

Hello high buckley,
OMG, in that spirit, I would suggest to go get a $99 per year per 1 TB 
web-based cloudy storage somewhere, if you don't care about your baby 
data...

what's $8K for enterprises?!
;-)
z, see pic again

- Original Message - 
From: Brandon High bh...@freaks.com

To: Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com
Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 7:53 PM
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?



On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com wrote:

How much is your time worth?


Quite a bit.


Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.


A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home
for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another
box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were around
$200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200.

I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere near
$1200. The X4200 uses 2.5 drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding
more drives ups the cost further. That means the afternoon I spent
setting my server up was worth $3000. I should tell my boss that.

A more reasonable comparison would be the Ultra 24. A system with
4x250 drives is $1650. I could build a 4 TB system today for *less*
than my 1TB system of 2 years ago, so let's use 3x750 + 1x250 drives.
(That's all the store will let me) and the price jumps to $2641.

Assume that I buy the cheapest x64 system (the X2100 M2 at $1228) and
add a drive tray because I want 4 drives ... well I can't. The
cheapest drive tray is $7465.

I have trouble justifying Sun hardware for many business applications
that don't require SPARC, let alone for the home. For custom systems
that most tinkerers would want at home, a shop like Silicon Mechanics
(http://www.siliconmechanics.com/) (or even Dell or HP) is almost
always a better deal on hardware.

-B

--
Brandon High : bh...@freaks.com
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread Scott Laird
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Brandon High bh...@freaks.com wrote:
 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com wrote:
 How much is your time worth?

 Quite a bit.

 Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
 Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
 You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.

 A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home
 for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another
 box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were around
 $200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200.

 I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere near
 $1200. The X4200 uses 2.5 drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding
 more drives ups the cost further. That means the afternoon I spent
 setting my server up was worth $3000. I should tell my boss that.

 A more reasonable comparison would be the Ultra 24. A system with
 4x250 drives is $1650. I could build a 4 TB system today for *less*
 than my 1TB system of 2 years ago, so let's use 3x750 + 1x250 drives.
 (That's all the store will let me) and the price jumps to $2641.

 Assume that I buy the cheapest x64 system (the X2100 M2 at $1228) and
 add a drive tray because I want 4 drives ... well I can't. The
 cheapest drive tray is $7465.

 I have trouble justifying Sun hardware for many business applications
 that don't require SPARC, let alone for the home. For custom systems
 that most tinkerers would want at home, a shop like Silicon Mechanics
 (http://www.siliconmechanics.com/) (or even Dell or HP) is almost
 always a better deal on hardware.

I agree completely.  About a year ago I spent around $800 (w/o drives)
on a NAS box for home.  I used a 4x PCI-X single-Xeon Supermicro MB, a
giant case, and a single 8-port Supermicro SATA card.  Then I dropped
a pair of 80 GB boot drives and 9x 500 GB drives into it.  With raidz2
plus a spare, that gives me around 2.7T of usable space.  When I
filled that up a few weeks back, I bought 2 more 8-port SATA cards, 2
Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-drive hot-swap bays, and 9 1.5T drives, all
for under $2k.  That's around $0.25/GB for the expansion and $0.36
overall, including last year's expensive 500G drives.

The closest that I can come to this config using current Sun hardware
is probably the X4540 w/ 500G drives; that's $35k for 14T of usable
disk (5x 8-way raidz2 + 1 spare + 2 boot disks), $2.48/GB.  It's much
nicer hardware but I don't care.  I'd also need an electrician (for 2x
240V circuits), a dedicated server room in my house (for the fan
noise), and probably a divorce lawyer :-).

Sun's hardware really isn't price-competitive on the low end,
especially when commercial support offerings have no value to you.
There's nothing really wrong with this, as long as you understand that
Sun's really only going to be selling into shops where Sun's support
and extra engineering makes financial sense.  In Sun's defense, this
is kind of an odd system, specially built for unusual requirements.

My NAS box works well enough for me.  It's probably eaten ~20 hours of
my time over the past year, partially because my Solaris is really
rusty and partially because pkg has left me with broken, unbootable
systems twice :-(.  It's hard to see how better hardware would have
helped with that, though.


Scott
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread JZ
ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing on you.

But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented not for 
home use?

Cindy, would you want to do ZFS at home, or just having some wine and music?

Can we focus on commercial usage?
please!



- Original Message - 
From: Scott Laird sc...@sigkill.org
To: Brandon High bh...@freaks.com
Cc: zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org; Peter Korn peter.k...@sun.com
Sent: Wednesday, January 07, 2009 9:28 PM
Subject: Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?


 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 4:53 PM, Brandon High bh...@freaks.com wrote:
 On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 7:45 AM, Joel Buckley joel.buck...@sun.com 
 wrote:
 How much is your time worth?

 Quite a bit.

 Consider the engineering effort going into every Sun Server.
 Any system from Sun is more than sufficient for a home server.
 You want more disks, then buy one with more slots.  Done.

 A few years ago, I put together the NAS box currently in use at home
 for $300 for 1TB of space. Mind you, I recycled the RAM from another
 box and the four 250GB disks were free. I think 250 drives were around
 $200 at the time, so let's say the system price was $1200.

 I don't think there's a Sun server that takes 4+ drives anywhere near
 $1200. The X4200 uses 2.5 drives, but costs $4255. Actually adding
 more drives ups the cost further. That means the afternoon I spent
 setting my server up was worth $3000. I should tell my boss that.

 A more reasonable comparison would be the Ultra 24. A system with
 4x250 drives is $1650. I could build a 4 TB system today for *less*
 than my 1TB system of 2 years ago, so let's use 3x750 + 1x250 drives.
 (That's all the store will let me) and the price jumps to $2641.

 Assume that I buy the cheapest x64 system (the X2100 M2 at $1228) and
 add a drive tray because I want 4 drives ... well I can't. The
 cheapest drive tray is $7465.

 I have trouble justifying Sun hardware for many business applications
 that don't require SPARC, let alone for the home. For custom systems
 that most tinkerers would want at home, a shop like Silicon Mechanics
 (http://www.siliconmechanics.com/) (or even Dell or HP) is almost
 always a better deal on hardware.

 I agree completely.  About a year ago I spent around $800 (w/o drives)
 on a NAS box for home.  I used a 4x PCI-X single-Xeon Supermicro MB, a
 giant case, and a single 8-port Supermicro SATA card.  Then I dropped
 a pair of 80 GB boot drives and 9x 500 GB drives into it.  With raidz2
 plus a spare, that gives me around 2.7T of usable space.  When I
 filled that up a few weeks back, I bought 2 more 8-port SATA cards, 2
 Supermicro CSE-M35T-1B 5-drive hot-swap bays, and 9 1.5T drives, all
 for under $2k.  That's around $0.25/GB for the expansion and $0.36
 overall, including last year's expensive 500G drives.

 The closest that I can come to this config using current Sun hardware
 is probably the X4540 w/ 500G drives; that's $35k for 14T of usable
 disk (5x 8-way raidz2 + 1 spare + 2 boot disks), $2.48/GB.  It's much
 nicer hardware but I don't care.  I'd also need an electrician (for 2x
 240V circuits), a dedicated server room in my house (for the fan
 noise), and probably a divorce lawyer :-).

 Sun's hardware really isn't price-competitive on the low end,
 especially when commercial support offerings have no value to you.
 There's nothing really wrong with this, as long as you understand that
 Sun's really only going to be selling into shops where Sun's support
 and extra engineering makes financial sense.  In Sun's defense, this
 is kind of an odd system, specially built for unusual requirements.

 My NAS box works well enough for me.  It's probably eaten ~20 hours of
 my time over the past year, partially because my Solaris is really
 rusty and partially because pkg has left me with broken, unbootable
 systems twice :-(.  It's hard to see how better hardware would have
 helped with that, though.


 Scott
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2009-01-07 Thread Scott Laird
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 6:43 PM, JZ j...@excelsioritsolutions.com wrote:
 ok, Scott, that sounded sincere. I am not going to do the pic thing on you.

 But do I have to spell this out to you -- somethings are invented not for
 home use?

Yeah, I'm sincere, but I've ordered more or less the same type of
hardware for commercial uses in the past.  There are a number of uses
for big, slow, cheap storage systems.  Disk-based backup is an easy
one--from a price/capacity standpoint, it's really hard to beat a
rackload of 4U systems stuffed full of cheap disks.

Not every application needs redundant power, multi-pathed disks,
highly-engineered servers, and a fleet of support engineers waiting
for your call.  In my experience, very few applications actually need
that--cheap, somewhat reliable systems with good replication and
failover usually beat enterprise-grade hardware anytime that the
cheaper hardware is even an option.  If you have a high transaction
rate, a need for perfect coherency and consistency, and failure is
expensive, then spending 3-10x the money for slightly higher
performance and slightly lower failure rates makes perfect sense.

Then again, I'm used to having enough quantity flying around to make
the cost differences worth it.  Spending 100 hours of staff time to
save $2k up front is dumb.  The last time I built commercial storage
servers like this, it took about two extra months of my time dealing
with vendors and qualifying hardware, but we shaved $250k off of a
$350k budget when the company was strapped for cash.  That was an easy
call.

It's all about quantifying your risks and knowing what you really
need.  In my experience, any time you can make software-based
replication do what you want, and you aren't paying massive per-server
software license fees, you're probably better off with a larger number
of cheaper systems vs. a smaller number of more expensive systems.


Scott
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-11-18 Thread Miles Nordin
 ah == Al Hopper [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

ah If you want a small system that is pre-built, look at every
ah possible permutation/combination of the Dell Vostro 200 box.

I guess Dell is backing out of this and a few other flashy bargains:

 
http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/halfprice-offer-a-mistake-says-dell/2008/11/18/1226770413954.html

according to Sydney Morning Herald, if they pull this shit again you
might throw a wrench into their scheme by paying some other way than
credit card, because at least under Ozzie law that makes a stronger
contract.  but US consumer laws always seem to be weaker, and I guess
bank transfer and BPay are more an EU/AU thing.

Just remember, Dell is not ``that company which sells insanely cheap
basic systems of reasonable quality.''  Rather it's ``the giant
company that gives each customer a different price, engages in
market-dumping, and pulls gimmicky come-on advertisements then plays
order-cancelling games.''  think crazy-eddie and hired furniture.
scratchy tan couches with cigarette burns and vodka stains.

we love you, Dell.  xx.


pgpafUdIFWK4q.pgp
Description: PGP signature
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-11-16 Thread Bill Werner
 If you want a small system that is pre-built, look at
 every possible
 permutation/combination of the Dell Vostro 200 box.

I agree, the Vostro 200 systems are an excellent deal.  Update to the latest 
BIOS and they will recognize 8GB of RAM.

The ONE problem with them, is that Dell does not enable AHCI, so SATA access is 
slower than it needs to be.
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-11-14 Thread Orvar Korvar
OpenSolaris + ZFS achieves 120MB/sec read speed with 4 SATA 7200 rpm discs.
440 MB/Sec read speed with 7 SATA discs. 220MB/sec write speed.
2GB/sec write speed with 48 discs (on SUN Thumper x4600).

I have links to websites were Ive read this.
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-11-09 Thread Alan Romeril
I had a problem like that on my laptop that also has an rge interface, ping 
worked fine, but ssh and ftp didn't.  To get around it I had to add
 set ip:dohwcksum = 0 
to /etc/system and reboot.

That worked and is worth a try for you :)

Cheers,
Alan
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-11-09 Thread Richard Elling
Since you are using the rge driver, you might be getting bit by CR6686415.
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/view_bug.do?bug_id=6686415

The symptoms are that some packets work, more likely with small packets
like pings, but large packets might not work.  I've also had trouble not 
being
able to talk to systems on my LAN, but able to get to the internet.   
Try the
workaround in the CR.
 -- richard

Peter Bridge wrote:
 Thanks for the replies, it seems like I may have to rewind a bit here and fix 
 some network issues on the solaris box before I can move forward with the OSX 
 connecting...

 As I mentioned, ping between boxes works fine. I can ping my osx box, my 
 router (192.168.1.1) and my other NAS.  But I last night I decided to have a 
 try with SMB since I wasn't getting far with NFS.  That's when I discovered 
 the Solaris box can't connect to the internet (needed to download some smb 
 packages, or are they on disk somewhere?).  Anyway I took the approach of 
 doing a clean install, since I've played around with so many things trying to 
 get NFS working.

 So after a clean install I noticed again that the dhcp had failed to assign 
 ipaddress to the interface.  So I started patching again things that seem to 
 be missing, the hostname.rge0 file was missing, so I added an entry with my 
 hostname (zfsnas).  I also had to tweak the hosts file and add 'dns' to 
 nsswitch.conf and create a file resolv.conf.  So here is my current setup:



 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# ifconfig -a
 lo0: flags=2001000849UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4,VIRTUAL mtu 8232 
 index 1
   inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff00 
 rge0: flags=201000843UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4,CoS mtu 1500 index 
 2
   inet 192.168.1.122 netmask ff00 broadcast 192.168.1.255
   ether 0:1c:c0:8e:a:3d 
 lo0: flags=2002000849UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv6,VIRTUAL mtu 8252 
 index 1
   inet6 ::1/128 

 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# cat /etc/hostname.rge0 
 zfsnas

 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# cat /etc/hosts
 127.0.0.1 localhost
 192.168.1.122 zfsnas zfsnas.local loghost

 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# cat /etc/nodename 
 zfsnas

 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# cat /etc/defaultrouter 
 192.168.1.1

 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# cat /etc/nsswitch.conf
 ...
 hosts:  files dns
 ...

 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# cat /etc/resolv.conf 
 nameserver 192.168.1.1

 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# cat /etc/nwam/llp
 rge0  static  192.168.1.122

 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# netstat -rn

 Routing Table: IPv4
   Destination   Gateway   Flags  Ref Use Interface 
   - - -- - 
 default  192.168.1.1  UG1  3   
 192.168.1.0  192.168.1.122U 1  2 rge0  
 127.0.0.1127.0.0.1UH1294 lo0 

 But even with all this, I can't connect outside of my LAN.  Should I switch 
 from nwam to a manual configuration?  or should nwam be able to handle this.  
 It seems strange already the the dhcp default setup fails.  Anyway, I don't 
 need internet access from this box, I was just trying to workout how to 
 download and install SMB.  But it did make me wonder if this might be related 
 to routing issues that might also affect the NFS stuff...

 With regard to ZFS, I have a mirrored pool of two disks 'data' and I create a 
 fs as follows:

 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# zfs create -o casesensitivity=mixed data/backup
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# zfs set sharenfs=on data/backup
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]:~# zfs set atime=off data

 Next I used system - administration - shared folders to add the /data/backup 
 directory for sharing with any computer in my LAN.  This seemed to work 
 previously, but now I'm noticing that since my fresh install nothing gets 
 remembered.  WHen I re-open the shares gui, the previous share is gone.  Any 
 tips on this one too?

 Sorry for so many questions, but I'm quite new to all this, but determined to 
 get things working now that I bought some specific hardware for the job.  
 Would it be worth trying with 2008-11 i noticed a 101a rc1b build that's now 
 available, or is it going to be too newbie unfriendly?
   

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-11-09 Thread Peter Bridge
wow, well done peeps, that was the problem!  Request to re-number that bug to 
666.  Totally evil, and what a waste of time that has caused.  Anyway, I have 
internet access from the box, which allowed me to easily install SMB which 
after a bit of messing around has now allowed me to access the box from OSX via 
SMB :))

I re-tested the NFS, but that still failed, but to be honest, I'm happier with 
smb anyway since it allows my other machines easier access to the zfs pool.

thanks to all for the emails and postings here.
Peter
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-11-07 Thread Peter Bridge
Just as a follow up.  I went ahead with the original hardware purchase, it was 
so much cheaper than the alternatives it was hard to resist.

Anyway, OS 2008-05 installed very nicely.  Although it mentions 32bit while 
booting, so I need to investigate that at some point.  The actual hardware 
seems stable and fast enough so far.  The CPU fan is much louder than I 
expected, so I'll probably swap that out since I want this box running 247 in 
the office and can't stand noisy machines.  Anyway I'm booting from a laptop 
ide drive with two sata disks in a mirrored zpool.  This seems to work fine 
although my testing has been limited due to some network problems...

I really need a step-by-step 'how to' to access this box from my OSX Leopard 
based macbook pro.

I've spent about 5 hours trying to get NFS working with minimal progress.  I've 
tried with nwadm disabled, although the two lines I entered to turn it off 
seemed to miss alot of other config items, so I ended up turning it back on.  
The reason I did that was the dhcp was failing to get an address, or that's 
what it looked like, so I wanted to try static address.  Anyway I found a way 
for using a static address with nwadm turned on.  Anyway, to cut a long story 
short, I can now ping between the machines, they have identicle users created 
id=501 and groups with id=501, but OSX just refuses in anyway to connect to the 
NFS share, from command line with various flag, or cmd k.

I'm going to clean install open solaris in the morning, maybe with the newest 
build 100? and try again, but I'd really appreciate some help from someone that 
has got this working.
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-11-07 Thread Miles Nordin
 pb == Peter Bridge [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

pb I really need a step-by-step 'how to' to access this box from
pb my OSX Leopard

What you need for NFS on a laptop is a good automount daemon and a
'umount -f' command that actually does what the man page claims.

The automounter in Leopard works well.  The one in Tiger doesn't---has
quirks and often needs to be rebooted.  AFAICT both 10.4 and 10.5 have
an 'umount -f' that works better than Linux and *BSD.

You can use the automounter by editing files in /etc, but a better way
might be to use the Directory Utility.  Here is an outdated guide, not
for Leopard:

 http://www.behanna.org/osx/nfs/howto4.html

The Leopard steps are:

 1. Open Directory Utility
 2. pick Mounts in the tab-bar
 3. click the Lock in the lower-left corner and authenticate
 4. press +
 5. unroll Advanced Mount Parameters
 6. fill out the form something like this:

   Remote NFS URL: nfs://10.100.100.149/export
   Mount location: /Network/terabithia/export
   Advanced Mount Parameters: nosuid nodev locallocks
   [x] Ignore set user ID privileges

 7. Press Verify
 8. Press Apply, or press Command-S

the locallocks mount parameter should be removed.  I need it with old
versions of Linux and Mac OS 10.5.  I don't need it with
10.4+oldLinux, and hopefully 10.5+Solaris won't need it either.

There is a 'net' mount parameter which changes Finder's behavior.
Also it might be better to mount on some tree outside /Network and
/Volumes since these seem to have some strange special meanings.
ymmv.

At my site I also put 'umask 000' in /etc/launchd.conf to,
errmatch user expectations of how the office used to work with
SMB.  For something fancier, you may have to get the Macs and Suns to
share userids with LDAP.  Someone recently posted a PDF here about an
ozzie site serious about Macs that'd done so:

 http://www.afp548.com/filemgmt_data/files/OSX%20HSM.pdf

Another thing worth knowing: macs throw up these boxes that say
something like

 Server gone.

   [Disconnect]

with a big red Disocnnect button.  If your NFS server reboots, they'll
throw one of these boxes at you.  It looks like you only have one
choice.  You actually have three:

 1. ignore the box
 2. press the tiny red [x] in the upper-left corner of the box
 3. press disconnect

If you do (3), Mac OS will do 'umount -f' for you.  At the time the
box appears, the umount has not been done yet.

If you do (1) or (2), any application using the NFS server (including
potentially Finder and all its windows, not just the NFS windows) will
pinwheel until the NFS server comes back.  When it does come back, all
the apps will continue without data loss, and if you did (1) the box
will also disappear on its own.  The error handling is quite good and
in line with Unixy expectations and NFS statelessness.


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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-29 Thread Martti Kuparinen
Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
 AMD Athelon/Opteron dual core likely matches or exceeds 
 Intel quad core for ZFS use due to a less bottlenecked memory channel.

How big is the difference? Does anyone have benchmarking results (maybe even 
when using ZFS on Solaris 10)?

Martti
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-29 Thread gm_sjo
Out of interest, and reasonably on-topic, can anyone predict
performance comparison (CIFS) between these two setups?

1) Dedicated Windows 2003 Server, Intel hardware SATA RAID controller
(single raid 5 array, 8 disks)

2) OpenSolaris+ZFS+CIFS, 8 drives with a SuperMicro controller
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-29 Thread Bob Friesenhahn
On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Martti Kuparinen wrote:

 Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
 AMD Athelon/Opteron dual core likely matches or exceeds
 Intel quad core for ZFS use due to a less bottlenecked memory channel.

 How big is the difference? Does anyone have benchmarking results (maybe even
 when using ZFS on Solaris 10)?

The big question would be what should be benchmarked.  ZFS is like a 
big RAM cache.  The more RAM the better.  You would be surprised how 
little disk activity there can really be on systems with a lot of RAM 
as long as synchronous writes are avoided.  As a result, some common 
scenarios mostly exercise RAM rather than the disk channel.

Unless you need a higher power CPU for other purposes, a ZFS-based 
server should focus on maximizing installed RAM.

Bob
==
Bob Friesenhahn
[EMAIL PROTECTED], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-29 Thread Al Hopper
On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Bob Friesenhahn
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Martti Kuparinen wrote:

 Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
 AMD Athelon/Opteron dual core likely matches or exceeds
 Intel quad core for ZFS use due to a less bottlenecked memory channel.

 How big is the difference? Does anyone have benchmarking results (maybe even
 when using ZFS on Solaris 10)?

 The big question would be what should be benchmarked.  ZFS is like a
 big RAM cache.  The more RAM the better.  You would be surprised how
 little disk activity there can really be on systems with a lot of RAM
 as long as synchronous writes are avoided.  As a result, some common
 scenarios mostly exercise RAM rather than the disk channel.

 Unless you need a higher power CPU for other purposes, a ZFS-based
 server should focus on maximizing installed RAM.

Agreed 100%

It's easy to find DDR2 RAM at around $20/gigabyte (based on 1Gb or 2Gb
DIMMs) and I've seen some deals as low a $8/Gb for Kingston RAM.

Regards,

-- 
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   Voice: 972.379.2133 Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Apr 2005 to Mar 2007
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/ogb_2005-2007/
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-29 Thread Richard Elling
Al Hopper wrote:
 On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 8:43 AM, Bob Friesenhahn
 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
   
 On Wed, 29 Oct 2008, Martti Kuparinen wrote:

 
 Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
   
 AMD Athelon/Opteron dual core likely matches or exceeds
 Intel quad core for ZFS use due to a less bottlenecked memory channel.
 
 How big is the difference? Does anyone have benchmarking results (maybe even
 when using ZFS on Solaris 10)?
   
 The big question would be what should be benchmarked.  ZFS is like a
 big RAM cache.  The more RAM the better.  You would be surprised how
 little disk activity there can really be on systems with a lot of RAM
 as long as synchronous writes are avoided.  As a result, some common
 scenarios mostly exercise RAM rather than the disk channel.

 Unless you need a higher power CPU for other purposes, a ZFS-based
 server should focus on maximizing installed RAM.
 

 Agreed 100%

 It's easy to find DDR2 RAM at around $20/gigabyte (based on 1Gb or 2Gb
 DIMMs) and I've seen some deals as low a $8/Gb for Kingston RAM.
   

ECC?
 -- richard

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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-29 Thread Rob Logan

  ECC?

$60 unbuffered 4GB 800MHz DDR2 ECC CL5 DIMM (Kit Of 2)
http://www.provantage.com/kingston-technology-kvr800d2e5k2-4g~7KIN90H4.htm

for Intel 32x0 north bridge like
http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-x7sbe~7SUPM11K.htm
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-29 Thread Mario Goebbels
Rob Logan wrote:
   ECC?
 
 $60 unbuffered 4GB 800MHz DDR2 ECC CL5 DIMM (Kit Of 2)
 http://www.provantage.com/kingston-technology-kvr800d2e5k2-4g~7KIN90H4.htm

Geez, I have to move to the US for cheap hardware. I've paid 120€ for
exactly that 4GB ECC kit (well, I bought two of these, so 240€) in Germany.

-mg




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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-26 Thread Peter Bridge
You have not described your requirements (low-power ??, low-cost ??).
But I'll contribute some pointers anyway! :)

Well for a home NAS I'm looking at noise as a big factor.  Also for a 24x7 box, 
power consumption, that's why the northbridge is putting me off slightly.

So far the other solutions mentioned here, and what I've found on various blogs 
are going to be a lot more noisy and power hungry.  Although the cost also 
makes this option very attractive, I'd be happy to pay a bit more for something 
with more grunt so long as it's quiet and energy efficient. Although I don't 
really mind if the box is slow, with ZFS what I'm looking for is secure data 
storage.  But with only two SATA ports I don't see how this board will quite 
acheive that.  Unless I boot from USB and use 2 SATA and 2 IDE drives.

btw I'm seeing mixed reports if the D945GCLF2 is seen as 64 bit by solaris.

Anyway thanks all for the great feedback!
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-26 Thread mike
On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 12:47 AM, Peter Bridge [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Well for a home NAS I'm looking at noise as a big factor.  Also for a 24x7 
 box, power consumption, that's why the northbridge is putting me off slightly.

That's why I built a full-sized tower using a Lian-Li case with noise
dampening on the sides, robber grommets and such in the drive bays,
etc..
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-26 Thread Peter Bridge
Same case and same idea :)  I have 2 dampered drives already installed from a 
previous project.  Another 2 I pulled out to install into a qnap 209.  Ideally 
I'd return the disks and replace the qnap with this new single ZFS NAS, 
although I'm quite fond of the qnap bt client, and can't use all four SATA with 
this board anyway...
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-26 Thread Daniel Leaberry
I just built a homeserver that pulls 62 watts from the plug at idle for
~$700. I had some of the parts lying around but even if you bought
everything at frys you should be able to set yourself up for under 1K for
the next 3-5 years.

Seasonic 80 plus 300 watt power supply
Intel DP35DP motherboard (onboard nic is an intel, has 6 sata from ich9)
E5200 Wolfdale processor (5 watts at idle, 30 watts at load)
4 x 1TB Samsung EcoGreen 5400 rpm harddrives
4GB ram
80GB laptop harddrive I had lying around for the system disk
Ati PCI 9200 video card I had lying around (pulls 2-3 watts)
Cheapest mid tower case off newegg with free shipping

The samsung drives are great, they don't ever spindown. I had problems with
some seagates a year or so back where the drive firmware would spin them
down after 90 seconds of inactivity. The samsungs just chug along at 4-5
watts each.

I use raidz on the 4 1TB drives and set copies=2 on the system drive. The
real power savings is from the cpu. Any dual core 45nm intel chip idles at
unbelivably low wattage. Add the 5400 rpm drives and you've got a nice cool
running, quiet, low power system.

If I only needed 1 TB I'd probably use the atom board with the two ports and
a usb jump drive for the system disk, but I needed more space.

Daniel

On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 2:51 AM, Peter Bridge [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote:

 Same case and same idea :)  I have 2 dampered drives already installed from
 a previous project.  Another 2 I pulled out to install into a qnap 209.
  Ideally I'd return the disks and replace the qnap with this new single ZFS
 NAS, although I'm quite fond of the qnap bt client, and can't use all four
 SATA with this board anyway...
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-26 Thread Orvar Korvar
For those of you who wants to build a NAS, this is mandatory reading I think. 
Read all comments too.

http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/



I use a P45 mobo, Intel Q9450, ATI4850 and 4 GB RAM. AOC SATA card with 8 Sata 
slots. 4 Samsung 500GB drives. Works excellent in a P182 antec.
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-25 Thread Al Hopper
On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 4:04 PM, Peter Bridge [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 I'm looking to buy some new hardware to build a home ZFS based NAS.  I know 
 ZFS can be quite CPU/mem hungry and I'd appreciate some opinions on the 
 following combination:

 Intel Essential Series D945GCLF2
 Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 2GB PC2-5300U CL5 (DDR2-667) (KVR667D2N5/2G)

 Firstly, does it sound like a reasonable combination to run OpenSolaris?

 Will Solaris make use of both processors? / all cores?

 Is it going to be enough power to run ZFS?

 I read that ZFS prefers 64bit, but it's not clear to me if the above board 
 will provide 64bit support.

 Also I already have 2 SATA II disks to throw in (using both onboard SATA II 
 ports), but ideally I would like to add a OS suitable PCI SATA card to add 
 maybe another 4 disks.  Any suggestions on a suitable card please?


-- quoting myself in another (possibly off-topic post) ---
I've tested OpenSolaris build 98, Belenix 0.7.1 and os20080501 on the
Intel D945GCLF2 Dual Core 1.6GHz Atom Mini-ITX Board.  Note the 2 at
the end of the part number - this indicates the dual-core Atom CPU.
All run fine and this board supports a single 2Gb DIMM.  It's a little
slow if you're building a desktop box, but fine if you're just doing
lightweight browsing, word processing etc.  Note that the board
chipset consumes more power than the Atom CPU.  A typical system based
on this board will consume around 55 Watts.   The other good news -
this board costs about $80 (including the soldered in CPU).  Just add
a 2Gb DIMM and an IDE drive and you're up and running!
-- end of quote - save time typing!  --

This is a great board - but a step backwards in terms of total CPU
horsepower, max memory size and expansion capability.  It's 32-bit.
Would I recommend it for ZFS - no.  Is it future proof - no.

You have not described your requirements (low-power ??, low-cost ??).
But I'll contribute some pointers anyway!  :)

See this article entitled: G31 And E7200: The Real Low-Power Story
October 10, 2008 – 1:50 AM – Motherboards at:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-e7200-g31,2039.html

The E7200 dual-core (2.53GHz with 3Mb of cache) is a sleeper product
IMHO.  Low power (well below the published 65W power envelope), plenty
of grunt and priced to go.  Couple this chip on a system with 4 or 8Gb
of RAM and you have a winner.  For example, consider the mid tier
system here: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15737/5 (the
motherboard is $126) with an e7200 CPU and 2 memory kits from here:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dapsfield-keywords=KVR800D2K2%2F4GRx=0y=0

Also, take a look at:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENEN=2010170147%201052108080%201052420643%201052315794%201052516065name=5

- look at the pricing *after* rebates and you're looking at brand-name
memory (2 * 2Gb = 4Gb total) for $65 here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227298

With ZFS - the most important hardware component is RAM.  Get as much
RAM as your motherboard will support (along with any budgetary
constraints).  My advice is the E7200 CPU, 8Gb of RAM and you'll have
a smile on your face every time you use this system.

If you want a small system that is pre-built, look at every possible
permutation/combination of the Dell Vostro 200 box.  Yes - I just put
together a system based on this box and made a few modifications  -
like replacing the PSU with a Corsair VX450W, added 4 * 1Gb of RAM and
an ATI Radeon 4850 (BTW Nvidia is much better supported under
OpenSolaris).  This system was built as a cost effective gamer box -
but it would make a great ZFS box for 2 to 4 SATA drives (with the
upgrades listed above [minus the graphics card]).

Email me offline if I can answer any further questions.

PS: It'll probably take you 2 or 3 hours to evaluate every combination
possible of the dell Vostro 200 box - but the price/performance is
unbeatable and it's hard to put together a comparable system, from
parts, for less money.  Obviously  Dell gets Intel processors for way
less than you and I.

Regards,

-- 
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   Voice: 972.379.2133 Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Apr 2005 to Mar 2007
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/ogb_2005-2007/
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-24 Thread Peter Bridge
thanks for all the feedback.  Some followup questions:

If OS will see all 4 cores, will it also make use of all 4 cores for ZFS. ie is 
ZFS fully multi threaded?

Is there any point to run ZFS over just two 2 disks?  without the extra sata 
ports I'm thinking I may have to abandon this idea.  The plan was to use the 
internal ide just for a small boot disk and cdrom.  I don't think it would be a 
good idea to mix ide and sata zfs, agreed?

We'll I'll do some more searching, maybe there is another quad core board out 
there with 8 sata ports, 4GB ram support and passive cooled north bridge :)
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-24 Thread Peter Bridge
oops, I mean 2 cores.

Anyway I'm having second thoughts about this board now because the northbridge 
sounds like a power hog and I was planning a passive cooled system.  Also I 
went through the hardware compatability list and can see what was mentioned 
about the lack of SATA card for PCI.  So back to the drawing board.

So any tips on a passivly cooled MB with 4-6 SATA II ports that runs well with 
OS?
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-24 Thread John-Paul Drawneek
Nvidia 5 series for amd - got good support for the chipset
Intel boards - as ICH9 drivers are in
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[zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-23 Thread Peter Bridge
I'm looking to buy some new hardware to build a home ZFS based NAS.  I know ZFS 
can be quite CPU/mem hungry and I'd appreciate some opinions on the following 
combination:

Intel Essential Series D945GCLF2
Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 2GB PC2-5300U CL5 (DDR2-667) (KVR667D2N5/2G)

Firstly, does it sound like a reasonable combination to run OpenSolaris?

Will Solaris make use of both processors? / all cores?

Is it going to be enough power to run ZFS?

I read that ZFS prefers 64bit, but it's not clear to me if the above board will 
provide 64bit support.

Also I already have 2 SATA II disks to throw in (using both onboard SATA II 
ports), but ideally I would like to add a OS suitable PCI SATA card to add 
maybe another 4 disks.  Any suggestions on a suitable card please?

Cheers
Peter
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-23 Thread mike
I'm running ZFS on nevada (b94 and b98) on two machines at home, both
with 4 gig ram. one has a quad core intel core2 w/ ECC ram, the other
has normal RAM and an athlon 64 dual-core low power. both seem to be
working great.

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 2:04 PM, Peter Bridge [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 I'm looking to buy some new hardware to build a home ZFS based NAS.  I know 
 ZFS can be quite CPU/mem hungry and I'd appreciate some opinions on the 
 following combination:

 Intel Essential Series D945GCLF2
 Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 2GB PC2-5300U CL5 (DDR2-667) (KVR667D2N5/2G)

 Firstly, does it sound like a reasonable combination to run OpenSolaris?

 Will Solaris make use of both processors? / all cores?

 Is it going to be enough power to run ZFS?

 I read that ZFS prefers 64bit, but it's not clear to me if the above board 
 will provide 64bit support.

 Also I already have 2 SATA II disks to throw in (using both onboard SATA II 
 ports), but ideally I would like to add a OS suitable PCI SATA card to add 
 maybe another 4 disks.  Any suggestions on a suitable card please?

 Cheers
 Peter
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-23 Thread John-Paul Drawneek
It depends on what your doing.

I got a AMD Sempron Processor LE-1100 (1.9Ghz) doing NAS for mythtv and seems 
to do ok.

If the board you quote is what your getting I think it is 64bit chip - intel 
site says its a Atom 330.

Solaris will should use all its cores/threads - intel have added a load of code 
to opensolaris not sure if Atom stuff was in it.

Think your out of luck for PCI SATA cards - not seen anything good about it.
Sil hardware is buggy, but its got the driver support.
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Re: [zfs-discuss] ZFS + OpenSolaris for home NAS?

2008-10-23 Thread Chris Greer
I've been looking at this board myself for the same thing
The blog below  is regarding the D945GCLF but looking at the two, it looks like 
the
processor is the only thing that is different (single core vs. dual core).

http://blogs.sun.com/PotstickerGuru/entry/solaris_running_on_intel_atom
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