New xeon zfs build

[turbochris]

I have a supermicro X9SCL-F with a xeon e3-1230 4c 8t 3.2ghz and 16gb ecc ram. I'm building a Z2 array with five 4tb drives that will give me about 11tb of storage. Should I put a drive in for the swap file? I have a WD raptor 10,000rpm drive or a SanDisk SSD I could use. I pretty much use it as just a file server. I plan on booting from a 32 gb USB thumb drive, would it be ok to just put the swap file on that?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Swap file, what are you talking about? That is not something to worry about with freenas. It will take care of everything for you. FreeNAS creates 2GB swap partition on each drive in the pool. And if you ever use that swap space you have big problems because it should never be used.

 

[turbochris]

What am I talking about? I guess I have no clue!

 

[Vito Reiter]

Swap file is used in correlation with RAM, so the hard disks can take some of the load for operations that RAM isn't currently using. It's really unrecommended to mess with that. As for your build, it looks great. Enterprise hardware, ECC RAM, good redundancy (Even though 6 drives is the sweet spot for RaidZ2). The only other thing I would recommend is a second USB to mirror boot drives to save downtime and a headache in the future, given USB drives are the most prone to failure.

 

[Stux]

Swap file, what are you talking about? That is not something to worry about with freenas. It will take care of everything for you. FreeNAS creates 2GB swap partition on each drive in the pool. And if you ever use that swap space you have big problems because it should never be used.

Last I checked there are still bugs in the ARC/UMA relationship in FreeBSD which cause swap to be used 'unnecessarily'.

I have a script to ameliorate this problem.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ny-used-swap-to-prevent-kernel-crashes.46206/

 

[SweetAndLow]

Last I checked there are still bugs in the ARC/UMA relationship in FreeBSD which cause swap to be used 'unnecessarily'.

I have a script to ameliorate this problem.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ny-used-swap-to-prevent-kernel-crashes.46206/

Yeah I know this exists but isn't the normal thing that happens. I wish it would get fixed.

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

[Stux]

It's normal to happen if you use rsync

 

[pschatz100]

Swap file is used in correlation with RAM, so the hard disks can take some of the load for operations that RAM isn't currently using. It's really unrecommended to mess with that. As for your build, it looks great. Enterprise hardware, ECC RAM, good redundancy (Even though 6 drives is the sweet spot for RaidZ2). The only other thing I would recommend is a second USB to mirror boot drives to save downtime and a headache in the future, given USB drives are the most prone to failure.

+1 on the recommendation to use mirrored USB thumb drives (if you are going to use thumb drives for boot device.) Buy good quality name brands. San Disk is well regarded on the forum. 16Gb will be enough, but 32Gb is fine.