Good Morning/Afternoon/Night..
I'm currently specing a new build, which I actually plan on putting together in the New Year due to finances and currently renovating the house.. (That's if the World hasn't already ended by 2012..).
Here are my thoughts on what I'm thinking of doing, and also the parts which I'm unsure about and would LOVE input on.
The main structure of the system I'm looking to build will consist of:
10 x 2TB HDD (manufacturer unknown at the moment - prices are likely to drop further, and I'm most likely gonna mix and match between them anyway, but all would be at the 5400RPM mark)
This will be configured in a ZFS RAIDZ2 array.
So 8 x 2TB - (the binary to decimal diff. ~10%) - (1/64th for ZFS COW) leaving me with approx. 14TB of storage.
Then I was looking at adding 2 x 2TB HDD to this in a 'Hot Spare' config and was wondering if it was a) possible to do this in FreeNas and b) if anyone who has got this working been able to set up the automatic replacement within the system so that it automatically rebuilds to a hot spare in the event of drive failure.
Once the main system was set up I was looking at the possibility of re-using 3 3TB HDD I will have (currently storing data) in a mirror config for the main system, and my question is does ZFS require the same number of physical drives or the same total TB size? Or if I would be able to get away with the mirror being ~9TB and the main being ~14TB??
Finally I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on the Cache ability within ZFS that would allow L2ARC from an SSD (90GB) to be used concurrently with RAM (I plan on initially installing 8GB with an additional 2 spare slots on the Mobo I'm currently looking at).
Any insight and knowledge (and experience) that you can send my way would be much appreciated!
I'm currently specing a new build, which I actually plan on putting together in the New Year due to finances and currently renovating the house.. (That's if the World hasn't already ended by 2012..).
Here are my thoughts on what I'm thinking of doing, and also the parts which I'm unsure about and would LOVE input on.
The main structure of the system I'm looking to build will consist of:
10 x 2TB HDD (manufacturer unknown at the moment - prices are likely to drop further, and I'm most likely gonna mix and match between them anyway, but all would be at the 5400RPM mark)
This will be configured in a ZFS RAIDZ2 array.
So 8 x 2TB - (the binary to decimal diff. ~10%) - (1/64th for ZFS COW) leaving me with approx. 14TB of storage.
Then I was looking at adding 2 x 2TB HDD to this in a 'Hot Spare' config and was wondering if it was a) possible to do this in FreeNas and b) if anyone who has got this working been able to set up the automatic replacement within the system so that it automatically rebuilds to a hot spare in the event of drive failure.
Once the main system was set up I was looking at the possibility of re-using 3 3TB HDD I will have (currently storing data) in a mirror config for the main system, and my question is does ZFS require the same number of physical drives or the same total TB size? Or if I would be able to get away with the mirror being ~9TB and the main being ~14TB??
Finally I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on the Cache ability within ZFS that would allow L2ARC from an SSD (90GB) to be used concurrently with RAM (I plan on initially installing 8GB with an additional 2 spare slots on the Mobo I'm currently looking at).
Any insight and knowledge (and experience) that you can send my way would be much appreciated!
