What do you all use for storage?
- Thread starter Hank C
- Start date
Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.
Used to be on ZFS, but after reading PigLover storage spaces test and benchmark, i started to test on it. With great surprise, performance is good. Moreover with smb3, its great in bandwidth too.
U can try and test with PigLover Guides:
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/serer-2012-r2-storage-spaces-and-tiering.2470/
U can try and test with PigLover Guides:
https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/serer-2012-r2-storage-spaces-and-tiering.2470/
Xpenology for me know...... love the low demands.
Used to Run ZFS / Solaris on my storage boxes..... but really 32gb ram and quad core cpu's just for something to hold and share files is a bit overkill.
low power dual core with 4gb ram is now overkill with Xpenology
Used to Run ZFS / Solaris on my storage boxes..... but really 32gb ram and quad core cpu's just for something to hold and share files is a bit overkill.
low power dual core with 4gb ram is now overkill with Xpenology
Xeon e3-1230v2, 16GB RAM, 2x M1015 x flashed to 9211i IT, 8x 2TB RAIDZ2, 4x 3TB RAIDZ1-0, 2x intel dual port NICs.
OmniOS/napp-it.
I have been running this setup for a 20 months or so, it has presented storage via comstar to my hyper-v and vmware environment as well as CIFS NAS storage without a hiccup.
OmniOS/napp-it.
I have been running this setup for a 20 months or so, it has presented storage via comstar to my hyper-v and vmware environment as well as CIFS NAS storage without a hiccup.
ZFS on Linux, Ubuntu 12.04, E3-1230V2, 32 GB RAM, 6x2TB Raidz2, 6x1TB Raidz1-0. 2xLSI 9211 in IT mode. SSD L2ARC.
Works very well.
Works very well.
Not sure I follow. ZFS modules get updated periodically, at every point release. Not sure what you mean by Btrfs, don't / won't use it, its not ready for prime time.
Not sure what you mean by not ready for prime time use. Me, for what it's worth, and Suse disagree.
I still giggle at all these builds with all the volatile and solid state storage thrown at arrays to speed them up a bit, in reaction to Stanza.
Why do you think that this tells the whole truth.
Xpenology is a Linux distribution with an ext4 filesystem.
If you install any Linux with ext4 and 4 GB RAM, performance is the same.
If you replace ext4 by ZFS performance is nearly the same. The extra load due to checksums is minimal.
If you replace Linux with Unix/Solaris the result is quite the same.
Especially with SMB, Solaris is mostly faster due the multithreaded CIFS server.
If you add a quadcore and use 32 GB RAM, you have nearly 30 GB of fast RAM readcache. This and enough CPU power for example to compress data makes the difference between a single user home/mediaserver to a high performance multi user storage.
If you are satisfied with your setup that delivers more or less raw disk performance you will find the same performance with Solaris/ Linux and ZFS at a higher level of data security.
Last edited:
ZFS zealotry says that you need lots of ECC RAM, though. I'm confused?
gea, are you saying ZFS doesn't need gigs of ECC RAM?
I'm interested in ZoL, just was trying it on Debian today in a VM, using Napp-it to configure the ZFS stuff. Loved the 1.1GB/s read speed on the ZFS Mirror (2x20GB virtual drives, E3-1240v3, 16GB RAM) - I doubt I'll get that on my little G3430 and 2x5TB Toshiba Cloud drives.
gea, are you saying ZFS doesn't need gigs of ECC RAM?
I'm interested in ZoL, just was trying it on Debian today in a VM, using Napp-it to configure the ZFS stuff. Loved the 1.1GB/s read speed on the ZFS Mirror (2x20GB virtual drives, E3-1240v3, 16GB RAM) - I doubt I'll get that on my little G3430 and 2x5TB Toshiba Cloud drives.
Last edited:
A filesystem does not really need RAM. Does not matter if you use ext4, NTFS or ZFS.
What you can say is that a modern 64 bit OS needs about 2 GB to run stable.
The myth about ZFS to be extremely memory hungry was born in a time when Windows and Linux used a few hundred GB RAM independant from load and RAM size (most of RAM was always free and unused) while a Solaris ZFS system used all available free RAM as read cache (no free RAM under load independent from RAM size). But this is not a requirement but a behaviour to be as fast as your hardware allows. If you reread bits from RAM this is 1000x faster compared to rereading from disk. So use as much RAM as you can afford as more RAM = performance. Sometimes 4GB is enough and a good value independent from storage size, sometimes 128 GB RAM is the right choice.
ZFS also does not need ECC. But ZFS does its best to avoid and detect data corruption or data loss. The only remaining item where this can occur are RAM errors. As ECC is quite cheap, you should prefer (with any desktop or server) Maybe the chance of RAM problems with ZFS is higher as ZFS use all RAM compared to old systems. But any newer Windows or Linux does RAM read caching as well. So this is no longer ZFS related.
Last edited:
Using ZFS / Openindiana and Napp-it. It just works in the background, perfect..Like the redundancy system, as such.
Is easy to have "equipment creep".. using 1155 SM board and 1260L, No VMs, but building a LGA 1366 system and 1356 system to learn some and FUN!! and have a few more PCIe slots available. Waiting for the C2750 series, if they had another slot.
Is easy to have "equipment creep".. using 1155 SM board and 1260L, No VMs, but building a LGA 1366 system and 1356 system to learn some and FUN!! and have a few more PCIe slots available. Waiting for the C2750 series, if they had another slot.
Agreed. Nice to hear this from someone else who's used ZFS 'in anger' for a long time. I used to run FreeNAS on an NL36 with the standard 1GB ECC RAM and it worked fine. But, if you go on to the FreeNAS forums they're all "Oh you need ECC, oh you need 16GB RAM, blah blah, arm waving, etc".
I tend to use non-ECC RAM because I refuse to pay 3 times the price for a 'server board' that has less features than a good quality standard board. I go with the mid-range Asus boards most of the time - I don't buy the cheap economy board, but I also don't buy the expensive ones with wifi and huge heatsinks and all that overclockery stuff.
I look after a few workstations at work, there's 6 Precision T5400 which have 8 sticks of ECC RAM each. In nearly 7 years, not one machine has registered a memory error that needed corrected. If 6 machines with 8 sticks each that run 24/7 for 7 years don't register an error, I think I'll take my chances.
Or just faster storage (e.g. flash based; like a single SSD via DP SAS, or a PCIe card, etc)