[geeks] ZFS sanity check

[Phil Stracchino]

Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>> Can my swap be on the zpool, and is it a good idea to do so?  Am I 
>> better off to put the swap on separate spindles from the boot disks to 
>> spread accesses, or put it on the same spindles to minimize the number 
>> of disks ZFS is only partially managing?
> 
> If you think your system will be swapping a lot, then it does help to 
> spread the I/O out a little.
> 
> However, when a system is paging to disk so much that drive speed 
> becomes a factor, you are already running at a fraction of your system's 
> full speed, so the real solution is to not need so many active pages on 
> disk.

Honestly, I'm expecting the machine to seldom swap or be heavily loaded. 
  It's a dual-Xeon Tyan motherboard with 4G of DDR333 RAM on it and four 
more slots available.

>> What else should I know?  What other factors should I be aware of that 
>> can affect my filesystem planning?  Is there a better way of 
>> approaching the whole problem?
> 
> The best method, if you have time, is to do a full install of everything 
> you want and partition the system so every base dir has its own mount 
> point.
> 
> Then look at how much space is taken up and make a plan.
> 
> It sucks in a way, but it's a sure way to know what is taken.

True.  Then again, if I'm going with separate boot disks, I can just 
throw all the base install on them, sigh theatrically about all the 
unused space, and not worry about it.  I can pick up a pair of Fujitsu 
40GB 2.5" SATA disks for $90.

Do 2.5" notebook SATA disks use the same physical connectors as 3.5" 
SATA disks?  I'm assuming they would, but assumptions have been wrong 
before.


-- 
   Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
   alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
          Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                  It's not the years, it's the mileage.