On 6 Nov 2008, at 04:09, Vincent Fox wrote: > According to the slides I have seen, a ZFS filesystem even on a > single disk can handle massive amounts of sector failure before it > becomes unusable. I seem to recall it said 1/8th of the disk? So > even on a single disk the redundancy in the metadata is valuable. > And if I don't have really very much data I can set copies=2 so I > have better protection for the data as well. > > My goal is a compact low-powered and low-maintenance widget. > Eliminating the chance of fsck is always a good thing now that I > have tasted ZFS.
In my personal experience, disks are more likely to fail completely than suffer from small sector failures. But don't get me wrong, provided you have a good backup strategy and can afford the downtime of replacing the disk and restoring, then ZFS is still a great filesystem to use for a single disk. Dont be put off. Many of the people on this list are running multi- terabyte enterprise solutions and are unable to think in terms of non- redundant, small numbers of gigabytes :-) > I'm going to try and see if Nevada will even install when it > arrives, and report back. Perhaps BSD is another option. If not I > will fall back to Ubuntu. I have FreeBSD and ZFS working fine(*) on a 1.8GHz VIA C7 (32bit) processor. Admittedly this is with 2GB of RAM, but I set aside 1GB for ARC and the machine is still showing 750MB free at the moment, so I'm sure it could run with 256MB of ARC in under 512MB. 1.8GHz is a fair bit faster than the Geode in the Fit-PC, but the C7 scales back to 900MHz and my machine still runs acceptably at that speed (although I wouldn't want to buildworld with it). I say, give it a go and see what happens. I'm sure I can still dimly recall a time when 500MHz/512MB was a kick-ass system... Jonathan (*) This machine can sustain 110MB/s off of the 4-disk RAIDZ1 set, which is substantially more than I can get over my 100Mb network. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
