On Wed, Jul 9, 2008 at 3:37 PM, Florin Iucha <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The question is, how should I partition the drives, and what tuning > parameters should I use for the pools and file systems? From reading > the best practices guides [1], [2], it seems that I cannot have the > root file system on a RAID-5 pool, but it has to be a separate storage > pool. This seems to be slightly at odds with the suggestion of using > whole-disks for ZFS, not just slices/partitions.
The reason for using a whole disk is that ZFS will turn on the drive's cache. When using slices, the cache is normally disabled. If all slices are using ZFS, you can turn the drive cache back on. I don't think it happens by default right now, but you can set it manually. Another alternative is to use an IDE to Compact Flash adapter, and boot off of flash. I'll be building a media server once we move, and that system will boot from flash. You can also boot from USB keys, but USB under OpenSolaris seems to be iffy. Here's the component list that I'm planning to use right now: http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?Source=MSWD&WishListNumber=7739092 I *may* change it and boot off another drive that is not part of the RAID-Z pool. > My plan right now is to create a 20 GB and a 720 GB slice on each > disk, then create two storage pools, one RAID-1 (20 GB) and one RAID-5 > (1.440 TB). Create the root, var, usr and opt file systems in the > first pool, and home, library and photos in the second. I hope I > won't need swap, but I could create three 1 GB slices (one on each > disk) for that. > > Does this sound like a good configuration? If you have enough memory (say 4gb) you probably won't need swap. I believe swap can live in a ZFS pool now too, so you won't necesarily need another slice. You'll just have RAID-Z protected swap. I built a Linux-based NAS a few years back using an almost identical scheme and wound up regretting it. In the future I would install the system on a completely separate disk or group of disks than the shared pool. > Should I pass any special parameters to the zfs pool and file system > creation tool to get the best performance? home and library contains > files between few KB and a fer MB. photos contains file roughly 7 to > 9 MB. Should I place those on separate pools? You shouldn't need to do anything. If you want to set the block size, or enable or disable compression, etc. you can create multiple filesystems in your pool rather than multiple pools. > Note: the hardware is committed (i.e. I already have it), so I am not > inclined to deviate from it 8^) You might want to look at a 4 or 8 port SATA adapter rather than wait for the southbridge fixes. -B -- Brandon High [EMAIL PROTECTED] "The good is the enemy of the best." - Nietzsche _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
