On Wed, September 30, 2009 07:14, Thomas Burgess wrote: > For the money, it's a much better option. you'll be able to afford many > more drives. In my opinion, for a home system, the more you can save on > the > case and power supply, the more hard drives you can buy. Right now 1 TB > and > 1.5 TB drives seem to be the best. I used 1 TB drives and 2 compact flash > cards for the os (with sata to compact flash adapters) They are really > small and easy to find a place to mount, which allows you to use the > hotswap bays for even more storage.
I've been running a home ZFS server for a while now; mine currently has two two-way mirrors of 400GB disks, i.e. 800GB usable data space. I've got a couple hundred GB free currently. This server holds my music collection, plus my digital photography, plus what's scanned of my film photography, plus my ebook collection, plus the usual random personal files &c. And it serves as a backup pool for several laptops. I can see that people heavily active in live audio or (especially) video recording would fill disks considerably faster than my still photography does (about 12MB per image, before I start editing it and storing extra copies). But I have to say that I'm finding the size NAS boxes people are building for what they call "home use" to be rather startling. I'm using 4 400GB disks with 100% redundancy; lots of people are talking about using 8 or more 1TB or bigger disks with 25% redundancy. That's a hugely bigger pool! Do you actually fill up that space? With what? I've got 8 hot-swap bays but only 6 controller channels on the motherboard. And I'm using two of those for the boot disks. I've thought about going away from rotating disks for boot, to something like CF cards, or USB. USB is slow, but will that hurt me any when the system is being a file server? What going to USB does for me is free up two SATA controllers, so I can expand my pool without buying another controller and messing about inside the box. Also, I don't need a mirrored pool for boot if it's a cheap USB drive and I can keep a spare copy or two, and just swap them if there's any problem with the first one. -- 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 _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
