[geeks] Recommendations for Home-Use RAID

[Jonathan Katz]

Sun stuff like RAIDz will run better on Sparc or AMD/x64 hardware, I'm
thinking.

On 8/10/07, J. Alexander Jacocks <jjacocks at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> on 2007/08/10, "Francois Dion" <francois.dion at gmail.com> wrote:
> >Get a PC, get a pair of SATA controllers (man marvell88sx to find what
> >cards work at top performance w/solaris, that's the chipset found in
> >thumper), and since you want to use PATA drives get SATA/PATA
> >adapters. I get them at a local store for about $7, I'm sure you can
> >do better online. Install Solaris 10 U4 (out officially in two weeks
> >or so). man zfs. depending on how you want to do this, and how many
> >drives total, you could go raid-z w/hot spare, or raid mirror+stripe.
> >It is one command line with zpool. Then create whatever zfs
> >filesystem(s) on top of the pool. You can auto share with samba
> >through the zfs command when you create the filesystem or later. You
> >can of course add nfs if you need it. You now have your own homebrew
> >Thumper.
>
> Have you done any performance testing with RAID-z?  I'm seeing performance
> of about 2.5MB/sec on my gigabit network at home, with large files, on the
> YM.  Small  files perform an order of magnitude worse.  Is RAID-z able to
> make use of large amounts of system RAM for cache?
>
> I've worked with SDS on Solaris 8 and 9 (sparc) and VxVM with software
> RAID-5, and it performs abominably.  BTDT, never again.
>
> >> and I'd like to significantly improve my write
> >> performance.
>
> >zfs w/ fast controllers and enough ram is pretty darn good. What kind
> >of throughput do you need? Sustained? What kind of data? Video?
>
> I'm looking for at least 5MB/sec (40mbps) average, on all types of
> files.  I
> already have a number of available P3 machines, with CPUs between 1 and
> 1.4gHz, that I'd be happy to dedicate to being a virtual filer head.
>
> Thanks!