[clue] ZFS?

[Yaverot]

My ZFS experience is with OpenSolaris firsthand, and FreeNas secondhand, in both cases with consumer/commodity parts.

4GB is fine if you're just using the system as a fileserver and not using dedup.  You want a 64bit processor, but haven't seen much of a case for the processor's speed, number of cores, or otherwise required features (like like hypervisor support and/or built-in AES).

Mirrors are the better choice over any raidz, if you care about IOPS, including rebuild time when disk dies; also you can't reshape (add/remove a column) to ZFS, that's a destroy & rebuild operation for its PoV.  That said, my current setup is raidz2.

Estimates for dedup are for 1 to 5 GB ram per post redundancy TB diskspace, on top of the base 2GB.  Or use SSD as a cache device, and there I'm caught up in OpenSolaris's assumptions.

Being this is the CLUE list, I'll state I have only very limited experience with zfs-fuse, and I was using that merely for a single drive hooked up over USB, and testing scrubs on it. I don't even remember which system I did that on.  I'll assume that if you any of ZFS's "real" features that the fuse implementation is more RAM&CPU than my above statements.

--- charles.d.burton at gmail.com wrote:

From: Charles Burton <charles.d.burton at gmail.com>
To: "CLUE's mailing list" <clue at cluedenver.org>
Subject: Re: [clue] ZFS?
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2012 22:52:19 -0600

Oh that is absolutely true, that filesystem loves it some memory.  I would
also make sure that you have at least one CPU core dedicated to it, all the
dynamic striping and whatnot is pretty computationally intensive.


On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 10:27 PM, Mike Bean <beandaemon at gmail.com> wrote:

> Agreed on all counts, I'm just double checking because my research
> suggests you probably shouldn't run it without a fair amount of memory.
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 10:01 PM, Charles Burton <
> charles.d.burton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Depends, do you need the huge address space, fast snapshots, ssd caching,
>> built in raid, dynamic striping, and what not? Personally I like it because
>> it's fun and I like playing with interesting tech, not because I really
>> need the enterprise features.
>> On Oct 16, 2012 9:55 PM, "Mike Bean" <beandaemon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>  What's the verdict on using ZFS on a backup server in a home
>>> environment with 6GB of RAM exactly?   Overkill?
>>>
>>> Bean