On Fri, 12 Jul 2013, Colin Fee <tfeccles@gmail.com> wrote:
So I'm looking for a strategy re the implementation of ZFS. I can install up to 4 SATA disks onto the mobo (5 in total with one slot used by the SSD)
Firstly plan what you are doing especially regarding boot. Do you want to have /boot be a RAID-1 across all 4 of the disks? Do you want it just on the SSD? My home server uses BTRFS (which is similar to ZFS in many ways) for mass storage and has a SSD for the root filesystem. That means that when some server task uses a lot of IO capacity on the mass storage it won't slow down local workstationa access. If you have a shared workstation/server plan then this might be worth considering. Don't bother with ZIL or L2ARC, most home use has no need for more performance than modern hard drives can provide and it's best to avoid the complexity. On Fri, 12 Jul 2013, Kevin <kevin@fuber.org> wrote:
You need 4GB min for a reasonable zfs server plus more if you use dedupe
I've had a server with 4G have repeated kernel OOM failures running ZFS even though dedupe wasn't enabled. I suggest that 8G is the bare minimum. On Fri, 12 Jul 2013, Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> wrote:
0. zfsonlinux is pretty easy to work with, easy to learn and to use.
Actually it's a massive PITA compared to every filesystem that most Linux users have ever used. You need DKMS to build the kernel modules and then the way ZFS operates is very different from traditional Linux filesystems.
1. if your disks are new and have 4K sectors OR if you're likely to add 4K-sector drives in future, then create your pool with 'ashift=12'
4K sector drives, if not quite the current standard right now, are pretty close to current standard and will inevitably replace the old 512-byte sector standard in a very short time.
If you are using disks that don't use 4K sectors then they are probably small by modern standards in which case you don't have such a need for ZFS. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/