ZFS Hardware Compatibility Lists

[damarious25]

Since ZFS burst on the scene information on it has grown substantially. It's like a brand new model car with its own tweaks and intricacies, where it might be best to let early adopters work out the kinks...

I was following ZFS in general about two years ago but completely fell off the radar when financing fell through and my dream for a ZFS file server faded. Well it's time and within the next 6 months I'd like to put together a 10TB minimum file server with ZFS with room for future expansion.

Years ago you had OpenSolaris and ZFS was fairly new for OpenIndiana, BSD and Linux distros. I mean, obviously it was available but it was recommended people use Solaris or Indiana. Hardware compatibility was also a critical consideration.

Today it seems there's a flavor of ZFS available for all distros and my question is, is OpenIndiana still at the top of the list for the latest and most stable releases? Are there still incompatibility issues with current hardware? My plan is to use mirrored SSDs for an OS and a cheap HDD controller card with 2TB or 3TB drives ran off the controller with ZFS in charge. Are there controller cards that handle information like a tokenring or do all handle data like a mesh network where you can have all cards sending and receiving data at once?

Thanks for the info. I have more but will save them for later.

-dam

 

[/dev/null]

I love my freebsd+zfs setup. I think it's been in freebsd sine 07 or 08, so it's pretty well refined.

 

[CEpeep]

If you want the best hardware support, use FreeBSD. ZFS will work on just about anything supported by it. If you want the latest implementation of ZFS with the newest features, use Solaris/OpenIndi.

I wouldn't recommend ZFS on Linux at all. You either have to use it through FUSE, or build your own kernel module for it from source: http://zfsonlinux.org/ Support is basically DIY if you go this route.

 

[damarious25]

Thanks for the info. I'm not normally a linux user so I'm trying to make this as painless as possible so I've been thinking Open Indiana for years as the way to go. So I guess things haven't changed all that much in that regard.

Also, I don't have the links on me now but I was following a few ZFS builds but they've reached a point where I'm a little lost. Anyone have any links to blogs with detailed beginnings of non-rackmounted builds where cheap was a priority?

Mainly I'm searching for hardware choices. the reasons, and I'll get the configuration figured out afterwards.

-Thanks

EDIT: Maybe I'll backtrack that decision and go for FreeBSD