The subject says it all. I will soon be installing an Areca ARC-1110 and 3x 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda SATAs into a 3.2GHz Northwood P4 with 1GB of RAM, and I'm wondering which would be the most stable filesystem to use.
I've read the bigdisk page [1] and the various information about ZFS on the FreeBSD Wiki [2]. I'm aware of the tuning requirements that ZFS requires, and upgrading to 4GB of RAM would be quite possible as it was understood beforehand that ZFS requires a large quantity of it. My questions are as follows. 1. I'm aware of the fact that ZFS works better on 64-bit platforms, and that alone has me thinking that it's not a good fit for this particular machine. But apart from that, it seems that ZFS is not yet stable enough for my environment (only about 25 users but in production nonetheless). To me, [3] paints all sorts of ugly pictures, which can be summarized as "count on ZFS-related panics and deadlocks happening fairly regularly" and "disabling ZIL in the interest of stability will put your data at risk." Comments about live systems using ZFS (on 7.0-RELEASE or 7-STABLE) would be appreciated. 2. [1] appears to be a bit dated. Nevertheless, I'm inclined to think that the status described there (as well as in various man pages) still applies to UFS2 on 7.0-RELEASE. Please correct me if I'm wrong or let me know if the state of affairs has improved significantly in 7-STABLE. 2a. Does the information contained in [1] apply to ZFS as well? 3. As the array will be for data only and not be booted, will it be possible to use fdisk to slice it up, or will I need to use gpt? 4. My planned course of action will be to attempt to newfs the device itself (da0, all 3TB of it) or 1 full-disk slice (da0s1). Failing that, I will attempt to gconcat da0s1 and da0s2 (1.5TB each), although I suspect that may not work since for one thing, growfs is not yet 64-bit clean. In either case, I'm very interested in using gbde/geli to encrypt the fs. If either of these paths are not possible or recommended, are there any suggestions for alternate means of creating a 3TB fs? 4a. If gconcat'ing 2 slices together (or some other suggetion) will in fact work, would doing so effectively work around the userland tool incompatibilities mentioned in [1]? Thank you! [1] http://freebsd.org/projects/bigdisk [2] http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS [3] http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSKnownProblems -- Anthony Chavez http://hexadecagram.org/ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
