For quite a while now I have wanted to get involved with both Solaris and ZFS, but never seemed to find the time.  A close friend and coworker of mine has decided to build a file server and has started to use OpenSolaris and ZFS, which has increased my interest in ZFS.

In some ways I wish I had considered ZFS more when I was building my file server.  I wanted a 12 drive card so I was limited in my choices and might not have found a 12 port card supported by Solaris.  Also not knowing Solaris I was unsure about having all of my files on a file system that only Solaris based distros can support reliably.  If ZFS didn’t work out I would have to move back to Linux, and that would be hard with as much data as I was storing.

The thing that is a real bummer is that I am now finding myself needing to expand the array and wanting to slim the setup a little bit.  What I mean by that is that I want to fill the card so that I am maxed out at the 12 drives, I want to buy the battery for the RAID card and I want to turn off journaling and just go with ext2.  So in the end I am really having to reevaluate how I want my file server to be.

The other option, if I can get the card to work with Solaris/OpenSolaris is ditching the hardware raid funtionality of the card and setup ZFS instead.  Right now, after tuning, I am only getting abut 350mb/s according to hdparm.  With each drive by itself getting 109mb/s on average, 8 of them should be a bit higher than 350.  I feel that having the card handle a lot of things is causing this problem and bypassing that might speed things up.  Again this is all banking on if I can get Solaris to run with that card, which I don’t think is going to happen.  I am going to research some cards again and see what 12 port non-raid cards are available, but I don’t think I want to spend all that money again.

You can’t beat this though:

zpool create raid2z c0t1d0 c0t2d0 c0t3d0 c0t4d0 c0t5d0 c0t6d0 c0t7d0 c0t8d0

That just bound all 8 disks in RAID6 and created the file system. No more fdisk and format and mkfs.ext3, etc. Simply beautiful!

For a long time I have been planning to build a massive NAS to store all my projects and photographs and my Linux distro collection. When I bought a lot of network equipment a while back a 5U case was included that I decided to use instead of ordering something. The case has 12 standard 5.25 bays and 1 slim 5.25 bay. It fix extended ATX motherboard and is quite long, so it gives me plenty of space. To make efficient use of the space I am putting in hotswap drive bays that will fit 5 hard drives in 3 bays, giving me a total capacity of 15 drives. I have also found a RAID card that supports RAID6, online expansion and all the goodies, and runs about $435. This is more than I wanted to spend, but RAID6 and an oncard processor is worth it. The machine will run FreeNAS and will allow me to have only 1 hard drive in all of my other machines. As of right now I have ordered and installed the following:

• AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+, Socket AM2
• G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800
• ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 Motherboard
• MSI GeForce 7300LE 128MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCIe Video Card

I just ordered a IDE->CF card adapter and one of the drive bays to make sure it is what I want. If I like the drive bay, the remaining parts I need are the RAID card, and 8 Western Digital 750GB hard drives. In RAID6, I will have 4.09TB of total space, if I went with RAID5 I would have 4.77TB. While RAID5 is good, I would feel better if I knew I could lose 2 drives and still have all my data safe. I mean this is going to be backups of my systems, and all the files that are most important to me. I may need to upgrade the power supply along the line, but for the time being I should be fine as it has a 420w PSU. I will post pictures when I get my new camera.