On Jul 4, 2011, at 6:42 AM, Lanky Doodle wrote: > Hiya, > > I''ve been doing a lot of research surrounding this and ZFS, including some > posts on here, though I am still left scratching my head. > > I am planning on using slow RPM drives for a home media server, and it's > these that seem to 'suffer' from a few problems; > > Seagate Barracuda LP - Looks to be the only true 512b sector hard disk. > Serious firmware issues > Western Digital Cavier Green - 4K sectors = crap write performance > Hitachi 5K3000 - Variable sector sizing (according to tech. specs) > Samsung SpinPoint F4 - Just plain old problems with them > > What is the best drive of the above 4, and are 4K drives really a no-no with > ZFS. Are there any alternatives in the same price bracket?
4K drives are fine, especially if the workload is read-mostly. Depending on the OS, you can tell ZFS to ignore the incorrect physical sector size reported by some drives. Today, this is easiest in FreeBSD, a little bit more tricky in OpenIndiana (patches and source are available for a few different implementations). Or you can just trick them out by starting the pool with a 4K sector device that doesn't lie (eg, iscsi target). > > Who would have thought choosing a hard disk could be so 'hard'! I recommend enterprise-grade disks, none of which made your short list ;-(. -- richard _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
