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ZFSGuru Build
- Thread starter vraa
- Start date
I actually gutted my old machine and did a hybrid match up between a lot of the parts I have and created a small monster
I want to thank a local Houston supplier who helped me source all the parts (and some replacements) within 20 minutes of notification!!!!
I had an old pc (my desktop gaming rig) which was getting short of breath. I got Dead Space 2 and while playing, I felt somewhat incomplete. I enjoyed Civilization 5, after I swapped the E6300 (1.86ghz C2D) with a E8400 (3.0ghz C2D) the time it took for turns dramatically decreased. That still did not make playing large maps enjoyable. Also, there is that Bad Company game which had some issues in heavy firefight scenes. Don't get me wrong, I love my PS3 (Don't have an Xbox) but I am tired of playing MAG. Plus I need something to pull my Excel up fast... a PC is still a requirement, even though Android and tablets dominated CES. The gaming rig also had a ATi Radeon 5750 1gb. Motherboard was a Gigabyte DS3 P35 and it had 4x1gb Patriot sticks (for a total for 4gb ram, which yes I know is tiny for ZFS, but.... it works and it's just storage not speed).
For this build, I used the motherboard, ram, cpu, video card mentioned above, I added a Norco RPC 450 case, 8x2tb Hitachi HDS722020ALA330's, and 3 Seagate 7200.10 500gb drives. I am using the Seagates in mirroring for the zfs root pool, and then the 8 drives in raid2z for a 12tb array.
Now the motherboard only has 6 sata on board. I am using four of the onboard ones for the 3 seagates, and 1 for the dvd burner. I at first was about to buy a Intel somethingsomethingsomething with 2 8087 connectors so I could buy the fanout cables and hook up all 8 Hitachi's to the same controller (and have to go through the bullshit of disconfiguring and configuring shit. No thanks. Instead I got 2x romise SATA300 TX4 for 60$ each.
Now this is where I am at
Thanks for the cropping idea!
Sorry these benchmarks are incomplete, I got tired and I wanted to sleep
What else would you guys like to see?
I want to thank a local Houston supplier who helped me source all the parts (and some replacements) within 20 minutes of notification!!!!
I had an old pc (my desktop gaming rig) which was getting short of breath. I got Dead Space 2 and while playing, I felt somewhat incomplete. I enjoyed Civilization 5, after I swapped the E6300 (1.86ghz C2D) with a E8400 (3.0ghz C2D) the time it took for turns dramatically decreased. That still did not make playing large maps enjoyable. Also, there is that Bad Company game which had some issues in heavy firefight scenes. Don't get me wrong, I love my PS3 (Don't have an Xbox) but I am tired of playing MAG. Plus I need something to pull my Excel up fast... a PC is still a requirement, even though Android and tablets dominated CES. The gaming rig also had a ATi Radeon 5750 1gb. Motherboard was a Gigabyte DS3 P35 and it had 4x1gb Patriot sticks (for a total for 4gb ram, which yes I know is tiny for ZFS, but.... it works and it's just storage not speed).
For this build, I used the motherboard, ram, cpu, video card mentioned above, I added a Norco RPC 450 case, 8x2tb Hitachi HDS722020ALA330's, and 3 Seagate 7200.10 500gb drives. I am using the Seagates in mirroring for the zfs root pool, and then the 8 drives in raid2z for a 12tb array.
Now the motherboard only has 6 sata on board. I am using four of the onboard ones for the 3 seagates, and 1 for the dvd burner. I at first was about to buy a Intel somethingsomethingsomething with 2 8087 connectors so I could buy the fanout cables and hook up all 8 Hitachi's to the same controller (and have to go through the bullshit of disconfiguring and configuring shit. No thanks. Instead I got 2x romise SATA300 TX4 for 60$ each.
Now this is where I am at
Thanks for the cropping idea!
Sorry these benchmarks are incomplete, I got tired and I wanted to sleep
What else would you guys like to see?
I believe Civ 5 is one of the most multithreaded games in extence, meaning that performance basically scales with CPU cores; if you have a quadcore at the same frequency, it could perform up to 2 times as good (less turn time).
Especially when you get late into the game there would be lots of pressure on the CPU. Less so on the GPU, i believe. So a quadcore for this game would be recommended.
For this build, I used the motherboard, ram, cpu, video card mentioned above, I added a Norco RPC 450 case, 8x2tb Hitachi HDS722020ALA330's, and 3 Seagate 7200.10 500gb drives. I am using the Seagates in mirroring for the zfs root pool, and then the 8 drives in raid2z for a 12tb array.
The Intel SASUC8i would be alot better though, since that Promise card is PCI. This will hurt your performance, it would be very hard to saturate gigabit. If the gigabit ethernet is on PCI as well then your performance will be really really bad.
PCI-express means data doesn't have to wait for 'its turn' like the shared-access PCI bus. With RAID, you would want dedicated links to your storage devices to gain optimal performance.
Regarding your boot problem, where is the system disk connected to? Can you connect the system disk(s) to the onboard controller? Is your onboard controller set to AHCI?
I reinstalled ZFSGuru -- I think it has to do with the setcopties=n were n is anything but off (on the boot pool)
They are AHCI and the boot pool drives are connected to the onboard controller
I didn't get the Intel cards because the local supplier didnt have any + it was 2x as much -- otherwise - I agree about the performance, I think in the benchmarks you can see 1.06gbit / 8 = ~130mb/sec * .80 = ~100mb/sec which is what the max my benchmarks show
Perhaps you enabled compression on the root filesystem; this is not supported. The compression can be active on usr and var filesystems though, which is the default.
Generally i recommend not to change your boot/system filesystem; just let it be! Especially for a production box you would be safer using separate USB sticks if you want to 'experiment around'; so if you want it to just work again you use the original stick instead. Do not connect two or more bootable devices at the same time, though! You should do this only when the system is powered off.
Generally i recommend not to change your boot/system filesystem; just let it be! Especially for a production box you would be safer using separate USB sticks if you want to 'experiment around'; so if you want it to just work again you use the original stick instead. Do not connect two or more bootable devices at the same time, though! You should do this only when the system is powered off.