[geeks] Cheap Dell Servers

Sridhar Ayengar ploopster at gmail.com
Thu Feb 7 13:52:25 CST 2008


Francois Dion wrote:
> 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.

I honestly haven't thought about which filesystem to use.  Does ZFS use 
log-structures?

Peace...  Sridhar



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