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Building a ZFS based SAN/NAS

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Cerberus2k7

Drifto Mexicano
Joined
Feb 15, 2004
Location
Morris, IL
Curious to see who here has built one based on ZFS. I have a spare Core2Duo(E8500) and a miniATX board with 4GB of DDR2 but from what I've been reading it does better with more RAM and I only have 2 slots. Would it be worth building the system up with a better motherboard and a bit more RAM, or would a single Xeon be more of a solid build(Thinking a rackmount version of a ML115)? Storage wise I'm probably looking at a 10 drive setup but still unsure what type of RAID I want to run. Mainly to be used for media/streaming but I do a bit of everything from render farms to terminal server storage.
 
ZFS loves memory. If you can, go with a server level board and utilize ECC memory, just another "check and balance" if you will. I just picked up a x58board & 24Gb of RAM, and a Xeon E5504 ES off ebay.

Only reason I went x58 was that I already had the ram, and since it has tri-channel......

What OS are you planning on using? FreeNAS is probably the easiest but performance can be shoddy
 
ZFS loves memory. If you can, go with a server level board and utilize ECC memory, just another "check and balance" if you will. I just picked up a x58board & 24Gb of RAM, and a Xeon E5504 ES off ebay.

Only reason I went x58 was that I already had the ram, and since it has tri-channel......

What OS are you planning on using? FreeNAS is probably the easiest but performance can be shoddy

CentOS would be ideal OS wise. Not sure how well it would be performance wise when using zfs fuse. Is there a TB/RAM ratio I should look out for? There shouldn't be too much utilization right now, but within the next year or so there will be a lot more in terms of data transfer.
 
CentOS would be ideal OS wise. Not sure how well it would be performance wise when using zfs fuse. Is there a TB/RAM ratio I should look out for? There shouldn't be too much utilization right now, but within the next year or so there will be a lot more in terms of data transfer.

thideras will be along shortly, he's a CentOS guy. Yes and no, for your TB/RAM. There are numbers out there, but many/most of them are based on a corporate NAS. For what most of us do, overkill.

I added SSDs for ZIL logs, no difference for what I do. For enterprise NAS, I'm sure it would make a difference.
 
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