Hello ZFS Discussion Members, I''m looking for help or advice on a project I''m working on: I have a 939 Gigabyte motherboard, with 4 SATAII ports on the nForce4 chipset, and 4 SATA ports off the SIL3114 controller. I recently purchased 5, 320gig SATAII drives... http://tinyurl.com/yf5z9o I wanted to install Solaris86 on this machine and turn it into a NAS server. ZFS looks very attractive, but I don''t believe it can be used for a boot drive. How would you setup a system like this? I can purchase additional SATA or IDE hard drives...For example, I could get 3 more 320gig SATAII drives, and fill all the SATA ports. And hook up an IDE drive as the system boot drive. Sincerely, Rob Elm Clark Consulting 3600 American Boulevard West Bloomington, MN 55431 rob.elm at clarkconsulting.com www.clarkconsulting.com NYSE: CLK ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- This is a transmission from Clark Consulting, and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. Clark Consulting assumes no responsibility for damages resulting from unauthorized access, disclosure or tampering, which could have occurred during transmission. If you have received this transmission in error, please destroy it and notify Clark Consulting immediately at 847-304-5800. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature Size: 3098 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20070122/10551c4f/attachment.bin>
Elm, Rob wrote:> Hello ZFS Discussion Members, > > I''m looking for help or advice on a project I''m working on: > > I have a 939 Gigabyte motherboard, with 4 SATAII ports on the nForce4 > chipset, and 4 SATA ports off the SIL3114 controller. I recently purchased > 5, 320gig SATAII drives... > > http://tinyurl.com/yf5z9o > > I wanted to install Solaris86 on this machine and turn it into a NAS server. > ZFS looks very attractive, but I don''t believe it can be used for a boot > drive. > > How would you setup a system like this? >I''d boot on ide for now. In the future, we''ll be able to boot from a ZFS mirror, but since most root drives don''t get much use, sticking w/ two ide drives there would prob. be fine. There are performance/space/safety tradeoffs to be made. What are your goals wrt to these attributes?> I can purchase additional SATA or IDE hard drives...For example, I could get > 3 more 320gig SATAII drives, and fill all the SATA ports. And hook up an > IDE drive as the system boot drive. > > Sincerely, >You may wish to take a look at my latest blog post: http://blogs.sun.com/barts - Bart -- Bart Smaalders Solaris Kernel Performance barts at cyber.eng.sun.com http://blogs.sun.com/barts
I would suggest using a CompactFlash card for the OS. I believe it works exactly like IDE, but is more reliable, sucks less power, and frees up a slot for the larger drive... On 1/22/07, Elm, Rob <rob.elm at clarkconsulting.com> wrote:> Hello ZFS Discussion Members, > > I''m looking for help or advice on a project I''m working on: > > I have a 939 Gigabyte motherboard, with 4 SATAII ports on the nForce4 > chipset, and 4 SATA ports off the SIL3114 controller. I recently purchased > 5, 320gig SATAII drives... > > http://tinyurl.com/yf5z9o > > I wanted to install Solaris86 on this machine and turn it into a NAS server. > ZFS looks very attractive, but I don''t believe it can be used for a boot > drive. > > How would you setup a system like this? > > I can purchase additional SATA or IDE hard drives...For example, I could get > 3 more 320gig SATAII drives, and fill all the SATA ports. And hook up an > IDE drive as the system boot drive. > > Sincerely, > > Rob Elm > > Clark Consulting > 3600 American Boulevard West > Bloomington, MN 55431 > rob.elm at clarkconsulting.com > www.clarkconsulting.com > NYSE: CLK > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > ---- > This is a transmission from Clark Consulting, and may contain information > that is privileged and confidential. Clark Consulting assumes no > responsibility for damages resulting from unauthorized access, disclosure or > tampering, which could have occurred during transmission. If you have > received this transmission in error, please destroy it and notify Clark > Consulting immediately at 847-304-5800. > > > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss > > > >
mike wrote:> I would suggest using a CompactFlash card for the OS. I believe it > works exactly like IDE, but is more reliable, sucks less power, and > frees up a slot for the larger drive...I believe there is a write limit (commonly 100000 writes) on CF and similar storage devices, but I don''t know for sure. Apart from that I think it''s a good idea. James C. McPherson -- Solaris kernel software engineer, system admin and troubleshooter http://www.jmcp.homeunix.com/blog Find me on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/jamescmcpherson
> I believe there is a write limit (commonly 100000 > writes) on CF and > similar storage devices, but I don''t know for sure. > Apart from that > I think it''s a good idea. > > > James C. McPhersonAs a consequence, the /tmp, /var, and swap could eventually be moved to the ZFS hard drives to greatly reduce I/O to the CF card. This message posted from opensolaris.org
Wade.Stuart at fallon.com
2007-Feb-08 16:29 UTC
[zfs-discuss] Re: ZFS on PC Based Hardware for NAS?
zfs-discuss-bounces at opensolaris.org wrote on 02/08/2007 10:23:19 AM:> > I believe there is a write limit (commonly 100000 > > writes) on CF and > > similar storage devices, but I don''t know for sure. > > Apart from that > > I think it''s a good idea. > > > > > > James C. McPherson > > As a consequence, the /tmp, /var, and swap could eventually be moved > to the ZFS hard drives to greatly reduce I/O to the CF card. >Or zfs''s slab logic could have a randomized block selector where every write to the cf device gets written to a random free block instead of the disk based weighing that is done now.
Wade.Stuart at fallon.com wrote:>>> I believe there is a write limit (commonly 100000 >>> writes) on CF and >>> similar storage devices, but I don''t know for sure. >>> Apart from that >>> I think it''s a good idea. >>> >>> James C. McPherson >> As a consequence, the /tmp, /var, and swap could eventually be moved >> to the ZFS hard drives to greatly reduce I/O to the CF card. > > Or zfs''s slab logic could have a randomized block selector where every > write to the cf device gets written to a random free block instead of the > disk based weighing that is done now.Most flash devices have wear leveling builtin, so I''m not sure that adding this feature to ZFS will accomplish much. IMHO, the more important ZFS feature, wrt flash, is COW. BTW, CFs can do a large number of random iops, much larger than any disk. -- richard
I will also recommend using CF or an IDE drive for your boot drive. From there, I would simply setup a raidz with 4 of the drives. Since you have 8 available sata spaces, it would make sense to use 4 drives now in raidz with 3 data plus 1 parity drives giving you roughly 960GB of storage in the pool. You can always add 4 more if you run out of space without having to buy another sata controller. I say this because when you add to a raidz pool, you need to add in the same increment.. in my example here, 4 drives at a time. You could also buy an external usb or firewire case for your fifth sata drive and use that as your boot disk. Good luck This message posted from opensolaris.org