--- rich.t...@rite-group.com wrote: >Space is starting to get a bit tight here, so I'm looking at adding >a couple of TB to my home server. I'm considering external USB or >FireWire attached drive enclosures. Cost is a real issue, but I also >want the data to be managed by ZFS--so enclosures without a JBOD option >have been disgarded (i.e., I don't want to use any internal HW RAID >controllers).
"tank" on my home file server is a raidz3 with all six drives hooked up via USB. Across 2 expansion card controllers. (Leaving the motherboard controller of mouse/keyboard, and hooking up a a fresh drive during capacity expansions.) >The intent would be put two 1TB or 2TB drives in the enclosure and use >ZFS to create a mirrored pool out of them. I'd mirror across enclosures. As a home setup, even if I label things, 3 more cables will appear before I want to plug or unplug. I want my single points of failure to be "the tower" and "the UPS" and "the guy in the mirror who can type zpool destroy" not any individual cable. >I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work, but I also have exactly >zero experience with this kind of set up! I appears to work fine with my commodity parts setup. I can't speak to the reliability of eSATA or FireWire as they fall in the "impossible to find" category. >would I be correct in thinking that I could buy two of >the above enclosures and connect them to two different USB ports? Don't see why not, but if you still want the single cable to accidentally disconnect, you could hook the enclosures up through a hub, and then use one port on the system. >Presumably, if that is the case, I could set them up as a RAID 10 >pool controlled by ZFS? Sure, and since you left ZFS in charge, you can upgrade them to three-way mirrors in the future if you desire. >Assuming my proposed enclosure would work, and assuming the use of >reasonable quality 7200 RPM disks, how would you expect the performance >to compare with the differential UltraSCSI set up I'm currently using? >I think the DWIS is rated at either 20MB/sec or 40MB/sec, so on the >surface, the USB attached drives would seem to be MUCH faster... Performance is one thing I don't know. My solution works for me. Lurking here I haven't heard enough of people talking in consistent terms to know where the bottleneck is in my system, and if it is something to worry about. That changes the moment I start talking to the server from more than one system at a time. And all this is with snv_134 should that make any difference. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
