It feels like I am getting closer to the end of my build process for a new NAS running ZFS, so I am asking for a little bit of help to get it all wrapped up. This question is specifically about which drive + RAIDZ configuration I should aim for with this box.
Originally I thought that I would have two 5 disk ZFS RAID-Z setups that were mirrors of each other. After running some benchmarks and seeing the performance (or not) of just one 5 disk setup I'm not sure sure that doubling up on the disks is such a good idea. The hope is to get better safety and redundancy without sacrificing too much in the way of performance. That way, when a disk inevitably dies, the entire NAS doesn't spiral down the drain and I'm not frantically running to the local stores looking for replacement drives.
Previously, I had a single hardware RAID-5 enclosure running 5 disks formatted XFS directly attached to a Proxmox VE (Debian) server box. This setup was the "primary" storage and was made up of 1TB disks. I then had a second, separate storage PC running FreeNAS 7 and ZFS on top of five 2TB disks. This was my "secondary" storage and it was mounted via NFS to the server box. A weekly rsync kept the two in close parity to each other. I had many, many disk failures on the primary box, possibly due to my choice of early Samsung 1TB disks. To my knowledge, there have been no failures on the secondary box, with WD 2TB green disks.
Performance on the primary box was excellent, as it was directly attached to the server. Transfer speeds on the secondary box were terrible, partly due to the leftover hardware I built that system from, and partly from FreeNAS 7. My new storage server is large enough to pull all this storage into a single enclosure on much more modern hardware, so I hope that these performance issues are gone.
My workload for these boxes include general PC backups, music/video/photo storage, DLNA serving, VM storage and the eventual need for a 24/7 file sync server (for when Windows Live Mesh goes away later in 2012). My network clients are a mix of Windows 7, Linux, PS3, Google TV and Android devices. Any thoughts or configurations you could share would be very helpful in making my decisions.
Thanks in advance.
Originally I thought that I would have two 5 disk ZFS RAID-Z setups that were mirrors of each other. After running some benchmarks and seeing the performance (or not) of just one 5 disk setup I'm not sure sure that doubling up on the disks is such a good idea. The hope is to get better safety and redundancy without sacrificing too much in the way of performance. That way, when a disk inevitably dies, the entire NAS doesn't spiral down the drain and I'm not frantically running to the local stores looking for replacement drives.
Previously, I had a single hardware RAID-5 enclosure running 5 disks formatted XFS directly attached to a Proxmox VE (Debian) server box. This setup was the "primary" storage and was made up of 1TB disks. I then had a second, separate storage PC running FreeNAS 7 and ZFS on top of five 2TB disks. This was my "secondary" storage and it was mounted via NFS to the server box. A weekly rsync kept the two in close parity to each other. I had many, many disk failures on the primary box, possibly due to my choice of early Samsung 1TB disks. To my knowledge, there have been no failures on the secondary box, with WD 2TB green disks.
Performance on the primary box was excellent, as it was directly attached to the server. Transfer speeds on the secondary box were terrible, partly due to the leftover hardware I built that system from, and partly from FreeNAS 7. My new storage server is large enough to pull all this storage into a single enclosure on much more modern hardware, so I hope that these performance issues are gone.
My workload for these boxes include general PC backups, music/video/photo storage, DLNA serving, VM storage and the eventual need for a 24/7 file sync server (for when Windows Live Mesh goes away later in 2012). My network clients are a mix of Windows 7, Linux, PS3, Google TV and Android devices. Any thoughts or configurations you could share would be very helpful in making my decisions.
Thanks in advance.