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Old 22nd July 2008
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phoenix phoenix is offline
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weasel:
ZFS works best in a 64-bit environment with 2 GB or more of RAM.

However, it will work fine in a 32-bit environment with less than 2 GB of RAM. You just have to do a lot of manual tuning.

I'm running a three-drive array at home using 32-bit FreeBSD 7-STABLE, s1 on each drive gmirror'd, s2 on each drive as swap and s3 on each drive in a raidz1 zpool. Took about a week to get the tuning down to the point where things run reliably with just 2 GB of RAM.

tanked:
If you are dead set on using raid0, then you may be better off using the braindead "raid" features in pseudoraid cards (Promise FasTrak, HighPoint RocketRAID, etc). However, IMO, using raid0 is just asking for trouble. Lose any 1 disk in the strip, and all your data, on all the drives in the stripe is gone.

If you are looking for speed, and have 4 drives, look into raid1+0 (aka raid10) using gstripe and gmirror or software raid controllers. Or a raidz1 or raidz2 setup with zfs.
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Last edited by phoenix; 23rd July 2008 at 04:34 PM. Reason: Add info on home zfs array
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