ZFS question

[dentifrice]

Hello all,

I'm new to freenas. I'm currently a openfiler user and I want to get rid of it.

Freenas looks like a very good alternative.

Problem is, my NAS is a dual core celeron with only 1gb of ram.

what problems will I have with this setup and zfs ?

And I read on another forum that ZFS implementation in freebsd is not as good as solaris...is it true ?

thanks !

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

zfs would love to have more ram, the more the better. most say 1GB RAM / 1TB HDD space minimum.
zfs in latest opensolaris is version 33, while zfs in latest freebsd is vs 28. But FreeNAS is currently based on FreeBSD 8.2 which only has zfs version 15, which doesn't have some features like deduplication, removable zlog, and raidz3. I bet FreeNAS will soon get zfs 28, by being based on FreeBSD 8.3. This will make it almost equal to latest Open Solaris.

Eventually I bet zfs features in FreeBSD 10 will pass OpenSolaris', cause I don't think Oracle is continuing development and FreeBSD is planning on forking.

 

[dentifrice]

thanks Joshua !

do you recommand using UFS instead on my setup ???


And what about western digital advanced format (4k sectors) http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888


do I have to manually allign partitions like I did with openfiler or freenas do it correctly like windows 7 ?

thanks

 

[Joshua Parker Ruehlig]

thanks Joshua !

do you recommand using UFS instead on my setup ???


And what about western digital advanced format (4k sectors) http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888


do I have to manually allign partitions like I did with openfiler or freenas do it correctly like windows 7 ?

thanks

UFS is probably better for a settup where you only have 1GB ram. Currently I don't think the plugin system will work for you but I think they are working on making it work for UFS systems as well.

I use 4k drives, make sure when you use them you force 4k alignment, I know you can/should do this with zfs. not sure if you can do this with UFS (never tried) on freenas.

 

[peterh]

zfs won't be stable with 1GB and 32 bit cpu.
Use ufs , it will be stable, but lacking some features that zfs offers.