> Replacing my current media server with another larger capacity media > server. Also switching over to solaris/zfs. > > Anyhow we have 24 drive capacity. These are for large sequential > access (large media files) used by no more than 3 or 5 users at a time.
What type of disks are you using, and how fast is your network? Will it be mostly read operations, or a lot of write operations too? Do you care about making sure the filer can keep up with the speed of the network? Typical 7200rpm sata disks can sustain approx 500Mbps, and therefore a 2-disk mirror can sustainably max out a Gb Ethernet. A bunch of 2-disk mirrors striped together would definitely be able to keep up. People often mistakenly think that raidz or raidz2 perform well, like a bunch of disks working as a team. In my tests, a raid5 configuration usually performs slower than a single disk, especially for writes. (Note: I said raid5, not raidz. I haven't tested zfs to see if raidz can outperform raid5 on an enterprise LSI raid controller fully accelerated.) If you want performance, go with a bunch of mirrors striped together. If you want to keep your GB/$ maximized, go for raidz. In either configuration, it is highly advisable to keep all disks identically sized, and have a hotspare. Also, if you get a single (doesn't need to be redundant) high performance SSD (can be small ... 32G or whatnot) disk to use for the ZIL, you get a performance boost that way too. I emphasize high performance, because not all cheap SSD's outperform real hard drives. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
