Several months have passed and my ZFS box is running quietly in the corner, supplying me with music, videos and photos as required. It's pretty effective.
A couple of things that I've learned and want to pass on:
- ZFS is a pain to try and expand. I am aware of that, but I will say it again now. So I'll be spending some time in the near future compressing my data requirements by eliminating duplicates so that I can push everything onto 4TB when I need to and then expand the system as required.
- fault tolerance really does work, and it works well.
Amazingly so.
One of the SATA connectors fell off and then a power cable dropped out, too; no problems with data.
- you can't get ZFS to sleep, so don't try. Run a scrub once a week and you're good.
- Samba can be a pain but now I'm getting 60MB/s plus and that's perfectly adequate for my expectations. Especially as it means I can run several card readers at once and the limitation is the reader / OS and not the network :)
It's also really nice to be able to process remotely as it's pretty quick and frees up the laptop for other stuff.
Overall? I'm a pretty happy bunny. No upgrades to 12.04 LTS here, though; I want this system to work properly.
I'd strongly recommend anyone who is looking at lots of disks in a case to think about suspending them. This box is currently in the corner of a large room (6-7m long) and I'm working at the other end. If the fan in the E6400 is on, I can't hear the box in the corner. It is running 8 (yes, eight) 3.5" disks and it's virtually inaudible from 5m. That's acceptable, in my book.
Before you ask, 6 onboard SATA, one extension card SATA as ZFS, one onboard as Cache, and then the system disk is still EIDE (and maybe limits performance, but I don't think by much, if at all). It now has 8GB of memory and that seems to be enough to allow dedup to work.
- Bret
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