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