I was using it at home until I lost two harddrives at once (due to old age, thank heavens for current backups).
Waiting for the replacements to arrive before rebuilding the system with raidz2.
Hardware used:
- MSI Master K7D motherboard
- dual-AthlonMP 1.8 GHz CPUs
- 3 GB SDRAM
- Promise FasTrak ATA133 controller
- 2x 100 GB ATA100 HDs
- 2x 160 GB ATA100 HDs
- 3Com 3c905C-TX NIC
Had ad0s1 and ad2s1 configured as a 36GB gmirror RAID1 array. ad0s2 and ad2s2 were 2GB swap partitions. And ad0s3, ad2s3, ad4s1, and ad6s1 were part of a 300GB raidz zpool.
/var, /usr, /usr/src, /usr/local, /usr/ports, /home, and /home/samba were all zfs filesystems. /var had a quota of 20GB, and /usr/src had compression enabled.
For the two weeks my drives lasted (using old, used, scrounged together drives is not recommended), things worked nicely. No kernel panics, no issues. /home/samba had 100 GB of mp3 music and mp4 movies shared via Samba to laptops around the house.
The only kernel tuning I did was to set vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1" and vfs.zfs.arc_max="1G" in /boot/loader.conf. The first disabled a feature known to cause issues, and the second limits ZFS to 1 GB of memory.
At work, I'm testing zfs on a:
- Tyan h2000M motherboard
- 2x dual-core Opteron 2.0 GHz CPUs
- 8 GB DDR2-667 ECC RAM
- 3Ware 9650SE-12ML SATA RAID controller (PCIe)
- 12x 500 GB harddrives in JBOD setup
- onboard Intel 10/100 NIC for management
- Broadcom 10/100/1000 NICs (unused)
- Intel Pro/1000MT quad-port NIC (will be used in a 4-port lagg(8) interface)
For testing, we have 64-bit FreeBSD 7-STABLE installed on 1 drive (to be gmirrored to another), a raidz2 zpool made up of 9 drives, with 1 left over for testing rebuilds with.
There's currently 1 zfs filesystem enabled. The server is running a nightly rsync of another server into the zfs filesystem, and snapshotting the filesystem after each rsync. We'll see how things go on Monday.
We haven't done any tuning of any kind (still running GENERIC) as yet.
We're investigating using this as a remote backup solution. (rsync the entire server once, then just sync the changes, and snapshot after each sync, and save 30 snapshots.)