Hello, I plan to use (Open)Solaris for a home file server. I wanted cool and quiet hardware, so I picked a mini-atx motherboard and case, an AMD64 CPU and 4 GB of RAM. My case has room for three hard drives and I have chosen 3x WD 750 Green Power hard drives. The file server will serve out via NFS and Samba the home directories, the library (collected articles and books in PDF format) and the photo archive (150GB and growing of photos in RAW format ~ 7-9MB/file).
I cannot use OpenSolaris 2008.05 since it does not recognize the SATA disks attached to the southbridge. A fix for this problem went into build 93. I will use SXCE 93 (for the SATA fix) or SXCE 94 (for the last revision of the ZFS format). In order to make the maximum amount of space available for the photos, I plan to use RAID-5 for that pool. Also, I would like to have sufficient redundancy so if a drive goes bad, I can just replace it and the volume manger/file system will take care of fixing itself back. The question is, how should I partition the drives, and what tuning parameters should I use for the pools and file systems? From reading the best practices guides [1], [2], it seems that I cannot have the root file system on a RAID-5 pool, but it has to be a separate storage pool. This seems to be slightly at odds with the suggestion of using whole-disks for ZFS, not just slices/partitions. My plan right now is to create a 20 GB and a 720 GB slice on each disk, then create two storage pools, one RAID-1 (20 GB) and one RAID-5 (1.440 TB). Create the root, var, usr and opt file systems in the first pool, and home, library and photos in the second. I hope I won't need swap, but I could create three 1 GB slices (one on each disk) for that. Does this sound like a good configuration? Will the SXCE 9[34] installer allow me to create the above setup? Should I pass any special parameters to the zfs pool and file system creation tool to get the best performance? home and library contains files between few KB and a fer MB. photos contains file roughly 7 to 9 MB. Should I place those on separate pools? Note: the hardware is committed (i.e. I already have it), so I am not inclined to deviate from it 8^) Thanks, florin 1: http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide 2: http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Configuration_Guide -- Bruce Schneier expects the Spanish Inquisition. http://geekz.co.uk/schneierfacts/fact/163
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