[geeks] Cheap Dell Servers

[Francois Dion]

On Feb 7, 2008 1:24 PM, Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com> wrote:
> Francois Dion wrote:
> > Nexenta with no GUI as the OS, ZFS boot/root mirror on the two
> > internal drives, ZFS raidz on the external drives.
> I'll be using it for similar purposes, but I'll be buffering my
> recording on the local disk of the multimedia machine (which has an
> almost-empty 400GB SATA drive) and then copying onto the NAS.  The NAS
> will be running FreeNAS, in all likelyhood.  If not that, NetBSD.

NetBSD has some ZFS support that is getting better, I'm assuming
that's what you are looking at? I wouldn't look at freenas until ZFS
is cooked in. Nexenta have a version that is specially made to use for
NAS too, and of course has ZFS. I went with the regular Nexenta Core.

My #1 reason for using nexenta was because native (in the kernel, not
Samba) CIFS was available there first, plus I wanted to play with the
debian packaging there. Still, I plan to switch back to Sol 10 when U5
is available. But even before that, my real number 1 reason was ZFS. I
think I've mentionned this before but I've lost a ton of vinyl records
I ripped to disk to silent corruption. I've also experienced silent
data corruption on Raid-5 at work. That's only once in 10 years (that
we know of.... it is always possible to have corruption and not know
about it), but I'm not redoing my vinyl records ever again (I was a DJ
for over 10 years, you can imagine). BTW, since it was *silent* data
corruption, even the backups were hosed.