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Old 24th March 2014
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Oko Oko is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Kosovo, Serbia
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Quote:
Originally Posted by vermaden View Post
I use MINI-ITX motherboard with dual core T8100 Intel CPU and 1 GB RAM with two 2TB disks in ZFS mirror, its more then enought for FreeNAS and home use (I use plain FreeBSD instead).
You know infinitely more about ZFS than me but since this is a public forum used by many to mine useful information I have to observe that your hardware doesn't meet minimal ZFS requirements. FreeNAS project has a stellar documentation thanks to Dru

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Har...ecommendations

A quick look will show that at least 8GB of RAM is required for any kind a serious data storage more like at least 1 GB for each TB of physical storage plus 1GB per each core. Also you do not even have enough disks to really run ZFS with any kind redundancy and data protection. This is official FreeNAS recommendation:
  • Start a RAIDZ1 at at 3, 5, or 9, disks.
  • Start a RAIDZ2 at 4, 6, or 10 disks.
  • Start a RAIDZ3 at 5, 7, or 11 disks.

The list goes on and on. If you just run ZFS at home for academic purposes that is OK but one should not be fooled that you are running a real ZFS file server.

As I said earlier I am not an expert on ZFS but I do run at work several file servers with effective capacity of over 20TB each running FreeNAS with proper hardware and proper redundancy. Those things start at $6000 and above even with all my discounts. I wasted at least a month of my life reading and learning about ZFS from FreeNAS documentation (NAS4Free not so great documentation but they also have good forum) and of course looking and FreeBSD forum. There is another FreeBSD based project IIRC called ZFS Gury. Have not been able to learn much from them. I have not considered Solaris based solutions due to the lack of familiarity with vanilla Solaris and very high entry bar when it comes to knowledge for each one of specialized storage solutions. Personally I would never run ZFS at home. Now your hardware looks like a perfect hardware for 2TB Hammer storage with mirroring running of DragonFly BSD but you already knew that.

Last edited by Oko; 25th March 2014 at 03:55 AM.
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