[geeks] Thoughts? (Cheap NAS with nice feature set)

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Apr 4, 2008, at 22:27 , Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:

> Alois Hammer wrote:
>> On Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:24:15 -0400, "Patrick Giagnocavo"
>> <patrick at zill.net> said:
>>> Yes, Blastwave.  And I would think that ZFS kicks any of the Linux  
>>> or BSD based filesystems on the features you want.
>> See later question about Blastwave working with stock Solaris 9 and  
>> 10?
>
> Watsa matta kid, you can't use a web browser or nuttin' ?  It's  
> plain as day on blastwave.org that they support 8,9,10 and often  
> with the same package.
>
>> I'm not doing anything terribly complicated with filesystems atm,  
>> so my
>> killer features are "goes real fast" and "fsck recovers a lot of  
>> usable
>> stuff in the event of disaster."  Also "has wide support" if  
>> possible.
>
> ZFS = no (or limited) disasters.  Everything is checksummed and you  
> can run a command that will check the checksums anytime you like  
> while the system is running and the fs is still mounted r/w.

On a single drive, does it give you anything protection wise?

I was hoping that maybe if a drive went bad, you could install another  
on USB/Firewire/whatever and add it to the pool with the failing  
drive, and migrate data to it without creating a new pool and copying  
data to new filesystems.

> Pretty sure that ZFS is being ported to Linux and FreeBSD and has  
> some level of usability right now.

ZFS is also in MacOS.  You can only mount ZFS drives since they didn't  
put in the creation tools or put it in Finder, but it seems pretty  
clear that ZFS is going to show up in Leopard at some point.

That would actually be pretty nice for some things I do on my Mac,  
assuming it works well.

I also would like to see other filesystems on the Mac.

One of the great missing pieces in UNIX right now is a nice common  
filesystem.

I keep having to create my "sneaker network" USB drives with FAT32,  
because it is the only filesystem that all of my primary systems  
understand.



-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com