Now then, going on the title alone the simple answer is ZFS every time. However, I am upgrading/migrating from various random file sharing and backup practices and I have an issue with hardware. I have at my disposal:
Intel D915GEV board with 3.4GHz P4HT
2GB (4x512MB) Kingston RAM
2x AMCC 9500S-4LP SATA RAID cards
6x 1TB WD10EFRX Red drives
I want to create 2 RAID5 arrays with 3x1TB drives each. Ideally I would like to just add all of these drives as JBOD to the system and then assign them as ZFS pools in FreeNAS, as recommended. Is this possible with the current RAID card choice, I can't seem to find much info on using these cards specifically with FreeNAS, but they do appear in the FreeBSD HCL.
Using the current hardware setup (even if I max out the memory at 4GB) this appears to not be recommended.So it looks like UFS and hardware RAID is the way to go, but I would like to be upgrading the server hardware at some point to enable me to use ZFS so it would be less hassle in the future if I could use ZFS now and then just migrate the pools to the new server then.
So I suppose really the actual question is, bearing in mind there will be 1 to 2 users accessing the drives, maybe a 3rd person once a week, but mainly none or 1, will using ZFS with 2 (or 4GB) of memory be completely unusable or unreliable? Would it be better or worse than hardware RAID5 with the AMCC cards?
Intel D915GEV board with 3.4GHz P4HT
2GB (4x512MB) Kingston RAM
2x AMCC 9500S-4LP SATA RAID cards
6x 1TB WD10EFRX Red drives
I want to create 2 RAID5 arrays with 3x1TB drives each. Ideally I would like to just add all of these drives as JBOD to the system and then assign them as ZFS pools in FreeNAS, as recommended. Is this possible with the current RAID card choice, I can't seem to find much info on using these cards specifically with FreeNAS, but they do appear in the FreeBSD HCL.
Using the current hardware setup (even if I max out the memory at 4GB) this appears to not be recommended.So it looks like UFS and hardware RAID is the way to go, but I would like to be upgrading the server hardware at some point to enable me to use ZFS so it would be less hassle in the future if I could use ZFS now and then just migrate the pools to the new server then.
So I suppose really the actual question is, bearing in mind there will be 1 to 2 users accessing the drives, maybe a 3rd person once a week, but mainly none or 1, will using ZFS with 2 (or 4GB) of memory be completely unusable or unreliable? Would it be better or worse than hardware RAID5 with the AMCC cards?