Post your ZFS systems

P

PointandClick

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 6, 2008
Messages
383
I currently have a Via C7 board with a single WD green that was intended for a raid 5 setup. After learning about zfs I intend to go that route so I am curious as to what hardware others are using.

Surely any reasonable dual core would be more than enough for basic nas functions. I had been looking at the 45w AMD parts. At what point would you need to start looking for more power, say if you were to run VM's on top?

So, if you would, post your specs and what the system is used for.
 
The big thing here is to pick an OS and then make sure whatever you use (hardware wise) is on the HCL of whatever OS you are using. Beyond that, there are things like features (KVM-over-IP, Intel NICs, remote mounting of ISOs, ECC support, and etc.) that are important to many people.
 
I'm curious as well to see what many are running. I'm just getting the wife to a point where I can likely get her to let me bulk buy most of the parts for the NAS build, but I'm still debating on a nice hardware raid setup using win 2k8r2 or a freebsd/opensolaris build using ZFS, though other options exist, those seem to be my main 2 that come to mind at this point.

Anyone offer up some of their rig designs (controller cards, cpu/mobo, number of drives and what zfs method used, performance, etc) so we can get a feel for it a bit?

thanks,
--pyr0
 
I have an Asus AMD 760G motherboard with six SATA ports and one PCI-e controller with two SATA ports (based on the SiL3132). This is together with AMD athlon-2 250 and 4GB Kingston 677mhz unbuffered ECC memory
With this I use seven SATA 500GB harddrives and two IDE drives(one with IDE to SATA adapter) for storage.

I've installed FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE on two mirrored 4GB USB memory sticks from Kingston. All harddrives are encrypted with GELI as the top layer and then raidz2(raid6) ZFS.
 
PointandClick said:
I currently have a Via C7 board with a single WD green that was intended for a raid 5 setup. After learning about zfs I intend to go that route so I am curious as to what hardware others are using.

Surely any reasonable dual core would be more than enough for basic nas functions. I had been looking at the 45w AMD parts. At what point would you need to start looking for more power, say if you were to run VM's on top?

So, if you would, post your specs and what the system is used for.
Click to expand...

I run Solaris 11 Express as my dom0 on Xen, and it also serves a 6tb raid-z as a fileserver. I also created some virtual zfs block devices and use those as hard drives for my domUs, which include a firewall/router/dhcp/dns server, a few webservers, a voice chat server, etc. I'm using an Athlon X2 with 4GB memory, and the only thing I'm considering is getting more memory since ZFS likes it.
 
I've got a Supermicro X8ST3-F with a Xeon W3520 and 12GB of ECC unbuffered memory running Freebsd 8.1. I'm currently using the onboard LSI 1068e SAS controller with an HP SAS expander to run a fully loaded Norco 4224, which is split into 3x Raid Z2 vdevs. The OS is installed on an intel x25v 40GB SSD. Most of the storage is for media (primarily blu-ray) but I do use some of the space for iscsi targets. I've got all of my steam games installed to an iscsi volume on the server, and performance is surprisingly good. I do plan on adding some SSDs for L2ARC and ZIL when the intel G3 drives are out, adding a second 40GB to mirror my root pool, and adding another 12GB of ram. I'm also seriously considering selling the SAS expander and replacing it with a couple of SAS controllers so each disk has dedicated bandwidth. I do realize this is overkill, but overkill is fun.
 
CPU: Intel Core2 Duo CPU E6750 @ 2.66GHz
RAM: 8GB DDR2
OS: FreeBSD 8.1 (ZFSguru 0.1.7)
Controller: Adaptec 2805
HDD: 8x 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP (CC35 Firmware)

Setup:
Motherboard, RAM, Controller were all salvaged from an old computers/servers that were being sent in for recycling so my cost was kept quite low. Drives are all running in a single raidz2 (raid6) and have been for over a month now. I'm sitting about about %50 total hard drive usage with no hiccups at all and it performs very well for my needs.

What I use it for:
Downloading from newsgroups (SABnzbd+) and sharing files over samba to my XBMC HTPC.
 
Last edited:
spankit said:
CPU:
Setup:
Motherboard, RAM, Controller were all salvaged from an old computers/servers that were being sent in for recycling so my cost was kept quite low. Drives are all running in a single raidz2 (raid6) and have been for over a month now. I'm sitting about about %50 total hard drive usage with no hiccups at all and it performs very well for my needs.
Click to expand...

Man, I never get deals like that. If I manage to pick up a free system it's a Pentium II :p
What size drives are those anyway? With such little price difference between the 1tb and 2 I'm wondering if I should purchase a couple more 1tb just to get a pool going, or sell it off and just move to 2tb drives.

Since I don't really have any VM's planned I think I'd be better off going with an X2. If my needs expand there will always be new stuff and cheaper prices.


I noticed a couple of you are sporting ECC ram. It seems like an issue that people tend to be highly divided on. For a home environment, mostly storing music/video and other random backups, how valuable is it?
 
Not using ECC is like gambling with the devil, in the long run you're fucked

Since most AMDs support ECC you have no excuse!
 
This box has been around for quite a few years now... Started with 200gb hard drives in it.
Performance is poor at the moment due to the old PCI 3114 controllers on the internal array and the single PCI-E 1x sil3132 controller for 8 disks (eek). I pull 120ish MB and push ~100MB on the 2tb external array. I can saturate my gigabit ethernet which is keeping me satisfied for the moment

This is all cheap consumer hardware...
I'm limited because the motherboard I have has NO PCI-E 4x ports so im limited on what I can use for controllers. I'm loading the 3xPCI-E 1x with 3132s (10 bucks each off ebay) giving me 10 SATA ports on the PCI-E bus.

Today server cases and hardware are alot cheaper than they used to be.
If I were building today I'd like to get something like the norco 20 or 24bay case with a ESXi supported controller. A Processor that has VM support would be a must, with a motherboard that has multiple PCI-E 8x slots.

Host OS is FreeBSD 8.1 2010-11 snapshot, pool version is V15
Server hosts via NFS/SMB

daemons;
Transmission - BitTorrent client (w/web browser interface)
Sabnzbd - usenet client (python w/web interface)
Sickbeard - automatic TV download management (python w/web interface)
Couchpotato - automatic movie downloader (python w/web interface)
pureftpd - ftp daemon (local convinence)
lighttpd - web server
ZFSGuru - beta ZFS monitoring and benchmarking PHP web script
ctrlproxy (local IRC proxy)

1tb drives are in RaidZ
2tb drives are in Raidz2.
Effectively gives me 20.something Tb of space

HW Specs;

Intel Pentium Duel Core 775 socket 2.2ghz from the Core2 Era (if i remember correctly)
P35 Gigabyte motherboard
4gb ram
2x PCI silicon image 3114 4 port SATA150 each (soon to be retired)
1x PCI-E silicon image 3132 2 port SATA300 each (soon to be 3x)
1x Intel 1000gb NIC

8 internal hotswap bays (4bays in 3x5-1/4 spaces)
7x 1tb (Driven 3x onboard intel ICH7 controller, 4x Sil3114 controller)
8x 2tb (External, driven via two port multipliers, PM driven by one sil3132 but will be changed to two seperate controllers soon)
 
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