On 11/29/14, 9:06 AM, Jeremy MountainJohnson wrote: > Greetings, > > I have a N54L Proliant Microserver I've been using that runs a linux > software RAID1 with two 1 TB drives at home. I'd like to fill up the > remaining next two bays with 1 TB drives for more space and additional > redundancy (aiming for two drive failure). Performance is not a huge > factor as it is a home server (I say this as the four bays use a port > multiplier, not a raid card). The OS runs on a separate drive and SATA > channel (so, 5 total SATA drives are possible), perhaps it's worth > doing 5 1 TB drives and throw the OS into the mix? I do a lot of work with zfs. It is my primary business. I kind of like the architecture in freenas of putting the os on 2 flash drives. FreeNAS 9.3 has mirrored boot or freebsd or omnios. I have posted a zfs bootcamp on my website if you would like ..http://kateleyco.com/?page_id=783 > > That said, I attended last years presentation on ZFS, and have even > played around a little with thumb drives and Linux on ZFS with no > issues. The server supports ECC, however I already purchased the RAM > for it as non-ECC and 16 gigs worth, so I'd hate to throw away that > investment to purchase more expensive ECC. Is it worth considering > even using ZFS on Linux with non-ECC? The presentation leaned toward > no, and that is the general consensus I'm seeing on forums. So, > perhaps stick to a software Linux raid6? If you want rock solid reliability, it only comes with ecc, Not to say I haven't seen systems run for a long time without it... but the chances are that you may have total pool failure. ZFS does self healing which most other fs's do not. If you send corrupt metadata to the pool... well at least you will know you have the error. > > Here are are my wants: > * Rock solid reliability and data integrity; I back up to Crashplan > via headless nightly, but would like to minimize any dependency on > this > * Needs to survive the rare, but inevitable power failure; perhaps a > UPS or other recommendations? ZFS if properly architected can survive most things. At sun, they would run a series of over 100 of the most dreadful tests on every build, nightly. COW makes sure that all inflight data is ignored and on disk state is always valid. > * Must be able to have minimum 2 drive failure > * Snapshots would be nice > * Support for encryption would nice, which the software raid option > gives me, am familiar with setting up LUKS Freenas has encryption built in. > > Based on a lot of recent tests, I'll probably go with Western Digital > drives for the cost savings and longevity, unless anyone has other > suggestions? The wd is the most widely used. > > Thanks in advance for any suggestions, > > -- > Jeremy MountainJohnson > Jeremy.MountainJohnson at gmail.com > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list