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Old 28th October 2009
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Default ZFS, is it worth for my fileserver?

Hi everyone,

it is being a long time since I played around with FreeBSD! Need your expert opinion!

I currently run my home file server in an old HP Server which I have upgraded with 2X250GB drives in raid1. Until recently I was running 6.3. Now I went to 8.0 RC2!
I would like to upgrade my box and found that with 200$ I can have 4G ram and a 64bit CPU which are mandatory for ZFS (I read).
My question is does it worth running ZFS? Despite the cost which I'm wiling to spend since I don't want my old hardware to die...

Needles to say that for the past 4 years, UFS and a good UPS never let me down.

So, please... ZFS pros and cons...

Thanks,

George


Reson For Edit: Forgot to mention that my system only supports 2 HDs
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Old 3rd November 2009
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For a simple RAID-1 setup, ZFS is sort of overkill. It looks like you're using a home fileserver with only one user, in this case performance probably won't increase either.

Here is an overview of ZFS features, go through the list and see if you really need any of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS#Features

Personally, I haven't yet found a use for ZFS ... I do know Phoenix uses it for backups at work, he described the setup and the advantages somewhere ... Either on this forum or on the FreeBSD Forums ... (Use search).

However, using ZFS might prove educational or fun. Altough I would be careful to have a backup of my data, filesystems is not an area where you want to make mistakes ...
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Old 3rd November 2009
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On FreeBSD Forums <-- That's a hyperlink, in case it's not underlined in your chosen theme.
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Old 7th November 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker View Post
However, using ZFS might prove educational or fun. Altough I would be careful to have a backup of my data, filesystems is not an area where you want to make mistakes ...
I agree with you 100% here!
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Old 13th November 2009
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After a lot of research I found this guide for a ZFS root(mirror) installation.

I also read a lot about opensolaris but I really want to stick to FreeBSD.
Any thoughts regarding the stability would be much appreciated!

Thanks
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Old 13th November 2009
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Phoenix uses ZFS in the Canadian school district he is working as system administrator. He uses ZFS for a big backup server, so I think it is stable

In the Guides section there is a link to his ZFS guide/howto.
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Old 21st November 2009
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FreeNAS also has a ZFS option now in it's configuration. Works great!

-Tim
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Old 21st November 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by windependence View Post
FreeNAS also has a ZFS option now in it's configuration. Works great!

-Tim
Thanks! But I run other services in my box as well!
So far I am experimenting with OpenSolaris. I will write a review soon.

Thanks,
George
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