recommended zfs implementation

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xXaNaXx

Gawd
Joined
May 15, 2003
Messages
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i have an Asus Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 motherboard and an AMD FX-6300 (i will be getting 32GB of ECC RAM at some point, but in the meantime, i'll be using 8GB of my main system's 16GB of non-ECC RAM, just to get things up & running). i am going to use it for a ZFS NAS server as a back-end for XBMC to serve up my DVD/Bluray collection that i've ripped and encoded into MKV files and my vast music collection, and will also probably serve as a central backup location anytime i need to wipe/reformat a machine, or make a safe copy of someone's data before working on their system.

for now, i have 5x Samsung EcoGreen F4 ST2000DL004 2TB hard drives for the data pool, which i will be running off the on-board SATA ports. at some point i will likely get an HBA to expand the storage when i need more. i'd like to be able to logically join the 2 separate hard drive pools into one larger pool when more hard drives are added, instead of having to have 2 separate mount points to have to point to in XBMC....i want it all to show up as one large, seamless drive to any connected client software.

if at all possible, i'd also like to be able to run Handbrake on it as well so i can free up my main system for gaming & whatnot.

is there any sort of setup that will let me do both the ZFS NAS setup & run Handbrake as well?
 
Linux? I mean you could do pretty much everything with a single Linux install. See ZFSOnLinux.
 
what about any of the NAS ZFS OS'es, like NAS4Free, FreeNAS, etc.? do any of those allow for the installation of additional applications like Handbrake?
 
you would need to install/compile it yourself.

To answer:

Yes it is possible.

No it won't be point and click.
 
If you insist on using Solaris, then you can run virtualized environments. I use Solaris, and virtualize Windows in VirtualBox for gaming and MS Office and stuff. I use Solaris as a backend, but do much of my work in virtualized Windows (or Linux). One advantage is that if I get a new computer, I just need to copy my Windows image to the new computer, and I dont need to setup a new computer. My Solaris installation is quite clean, and I can reinstall or whatever without affecting the Windows image used for main work.

Or use ESXi and run Solaris and Windows virtualized.

Or use Linux and ZFSonLinux if you are satisfied with only Linux.

Or compile it yourself to Solaris.
 
The project I work on (ZFSguru) has a Handbrake service addon which you can install with two mouseclicks. Other services are also present like XBMC, Plex, PS3MediaServer, Transmission, SABnzbd+, etc.

I do recommend a ZFS implementation based on the BSD operating system, which has the best implementation of ZFS and in particular: disk subsystems and I/O infrastructure.
 
Another vote for running Linux with ZoL. I have been running it for almost 2 years now and it is fantastic. If you are using Ubuntu there is even a PPA you can add so you can literally install zfs with apt-get. It will handle rebuilding all of the kernel modules when a new ZFS release or a new kernel update comes along. Very very handy.

Then handbrake would be really easy to get going as well, I think there might even be a ppa for it as well.
 
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