[geeks] Recommendations for Home-Use RAID

[J. Alexander Jacocks]

on 2007/08/10, "Francois Dion" <francois.dion at gmail.com> wrote:
>Get a PC, get a pair of SATA controllers (man marvell88sx to find what
>cards work at top performance w/solaris, that's the chipset found in
>thumper), and since you want to use PATA drives get SATA/PATA
>adapters. I get them at a local store for about $7, I'm sure you can
>do better online. Install Solaris 10 U4 (out officially in two weeks
>or so). man zfs. depending on how you want to do this, and how many
>drives total, you could go raid-z w/hot spare, or raid mirror+stripe.
>It is one command line with zpool. Then create whatever zfs
>filesystem(s) on top of the pool. You can auto share with samba
>through the zfs command when you create the filesystem or later. You
>can of course add nfs if you need it. You now have your own homebrew
>Thumper.

Have you done any performance testing with RAID-z?  I'm seeing performance
of about 2.5MB/sec on my gigabit network at home, with large files, on the
YM.  Small  files perform an order of magnitude worse.  Is RAID-z able to
make use of large amounts of system RAM for cache?

I've worked with SDS on Solaris 8 and 9 (sparc) and VxVM with software
RAID-5, and it performs abominably.  BTDT, never again.

>> and I'd like to significantly improve my write
>> performance.

>zfs w/ fast controllers and enough ram is pretty darn good. What kind
>of throughput do you need? Sustained? What kind of data? Video?

I'm looking for at least 5MB/sec (40mbps) average, on all types of files.  I
already have a number of available P3 machines, with CPUs between 1 and
1.4gHz, that I'd be happy to dedicate to being a virtual filer head.

Thanks!

-- 
bc3c: there are only a few things people really want... food, shelter, and
no ED