Thanks for the responses guys. It looks like I'll probably use RaidZ2 with 8 drives. The write bandwidth isn't that great as it'll be a hundred gigs every couple weeks but in a bulk load type of environment. So, not a major issue. Testing with 8 drives in a raidz2 easily saturated a GigE connection on the client and the server side. We'll probably link aggregate two GigE ports onto the switch to boost the incoming bandwidth.
In response to some of the other questions - drives are SATA drives 7200. All connected via a SAS expander backplane onto a machine. CPU cycles obviously aren't an issue on a Xeon machine/24Gig memory. We considered a SSD ZIL as well but from my understanding it won't help much on sequential bulk writes but really helps on random writes (to sequence going to disk better). Also, doubt L2ARC/ARC will help that much for sequential either. I could be wrong on both counts here so please correct me if I'm wrong. Currently testing with 8 disk RaidZ2 and see how that performs. As it isn't speed critical - this will probably be the sweet spot between storage and reliability for us. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
