WD Green drives have a very high rate of infant mortality in my experience, so it's definitely good to be cautious. The 2TB seem to be especially unreliable, judging from the Newegg reviews. I recently bought 2 2TB Hitachi drives, they seem to get more favorable reviews for reliablity . . . although I was dismayed to find that they don't support SMART monitoring.
I think current Linux kernels fix the 4KB sector performance problem, but I've been following this guide anyway to be sure: http://www.formortals.com/how-to-create-4kb-aligned-partitions-in-windows-xp-and-linux/ I've done some testing with ZFS mirroring 2 drives in FreeNAS, and it seems to work well. FreeNAS makes it very easy to set up ZFS pools with mirroring, but the web interface is lacking - there's no way to set up snapshots, or set alerts if one of the drives fails (or at least last time I checked, it's been a while). Luckily, it's quite easy to use some basic scripting to take care of that. See here for an example: http://harryd71.blogspot.com/2008/08/freenas-07-and-zfs-snapshots.html . I also set up a cron job to make the PC speaker beep obnoxiously if the state was was anything other than online: #!/bin/sh state=`zpool status|grep "state: "|awk '{print $2}'` if [ "$state" != "ONLINE" ]; then echo "bCbCb" > /dev/speaker fi I don't think ZFS is going to die any time soon - FreeBSD seems to be doing a lot with it, and iXsystems is now developing FreeNAS, and selling FreeNAS boxes . . . so hopefully that will keep ZFS going, even if Oracle decides to do something evil with it. Asa
