Hello,
To save time for folk reading, ill start with the question first and you can read the back story if you wish...
The base (and oft reported to work fine for home use) memory recommendation for proper ZFS working is 8Gb then extra for plugins etc. As such im opting for 12Gb.
It looks like ill have a 4 x 2Tb RAIDZ1 array (currently configured) for non-critical multimedia and another 2 x 3Tb Mirror array for the more valuable data (local and remote backups will naturally continue).
What i cant find (possibly as its a non-issue) is - would having two array types carry a RAM penalty which should make me go towards 16Gb(?) of memory to avoid any issues, aside from the obvious benefits more memory would bring to a setup anyway.
The background:
After the week or so of developing with the "old clunker" as another user put it (some fascinating threads here, and here i started) i decided i would direct funds towards a pair of 3TB NAS grade (eg WD red, not bought yet, just getting prices and doing some research on what to pick exactly) drives which will run in Mirror mode for the most valuable data. This would be at the expense of the latest greatest server boards and processors which i don't need in my PC which has to do many things too and does what i need it to do.
The music, movies, tv shows, software and other stuff which i could do without for a few days or more whilst i restore from backups will sit in a RAIDZ1 array. Should i suffer the dreaded single disk failure (as i did a few years ago with hardware RAID5) ill just need to sweat the rebuild or go back to a backup.
I did read with worry an excellent guide by one of the most amiable and wonderfully sarcastic yet secretly helpful mods which warned there was no ZFS recovery tool (somebody write one and save the world...?) so i feel (until scorned otherwise over the next few hours) a mirror is safest for now (it does leave one drive holding data during rebuild but is a quicker and less stressful on the hardware than a parity based rebuild?)
Anyway, to this end of investing in better drives, i decided to buy a supermicro X8STi board as it also means i can use the 1366 Hex core Xeon from main PC for testing until i buy one for the NAS. It also means i have two CPUs compatible with two machines which is handy (3 if you count the i7 which is back in the PC where it was). Currently using the inbuilt board disk controller and USB stick for boot drive.
Also bought and received 12Gb of ECC Memory (all the info is pretty clear ECC is a must so why ignore sage advice when you don't need to) however misread the listing which described it as "not unregistered" - me misreading the "un" part and double negative at 1am on eBay resulted in 3 sticks of registered and incompatible memory arriving :(
I am currently using non-ECC from my main PC (don't all shout, first please research the words "temporary" and "development" if you feel like shouting) and the system has been running well.
I know these are not the latest greatest components however things have been working well these last few days. Many users are also currently using this generation of components so when the comments come back about building a system with older parts, ill be interested to see what those running with this era of parts already say about it... :)
Have had the system being hit for the last 12 hours with CIFS read and write from 2 PC's (both gigabit). and also transcoding various movies to 6 separate devices. CPU usage was touching 80% in places and Ethernet bandwidth has sat in the region of 850-950Mbps without a hiccup to the streaming.
Once the correct memory arrives, ill get some stress testing etc done inline with the various guides.
To save time for folk reading, ill start with the question first and you can read the back story if you wish...
The base (and oft reported to work fine for home use) memory recommendation for proper ZFS working is 8Gb then extra for plugins etc. As such im opting for 12Gb.
It looks like ill have a 4 x 2Tb RAIDZ1 array (currently configured) for non-critical multimedia and another 2 x 3Tb Mirror array for the more valuable data (local and remote backups will naturally continue).
What i cant find (possibly as its a non-issue) is - would having two array types carry a RAM penalty which should make me go towards 16Gb(?) of memory to avoid any issues, aside from the obvious benefits more memory would bring to a setup anyway.
The background:
After the week or so of developing with the "old clunker" as another user put it (some fascinating threads here, and here i started) i decided i would direct funds towards a pair of 3TB NAS grade (eg WD red, not bought yet, just getting prices and doing some research on what to pick exactly) drives which will run in Mirror mode for the most valuable data. This would be at the expense of the latest greatest server boards and processors which i don't need in my PC which has to do many things too and does what i need it to do.
The music, movies, tv shows, software and other stuff which i could do without for a few days or more whilst i restore from backups will sit in a RAIDZ1 array. Should i suffer the dreaded single disk failure (as i did a few years ago with hardware RAID5) ill just need to sweat the rebuild or go back to a backup.
I did read with worry an excellent guide by one of the most amiable and wonderfully sarcastic yet secretly helpful mods which warned there was no ZFS recovery tool (somebody write one and save the world...?) so i feel (until scorned otherwise over the next few hours) a mirror is safest for now (it does leave one drive holding data during rebuild but is a quicker and less stressful on the hardware than a parity based rebuild?)
Anyway, to this end of investing in better drives, i decided to buy a supermicro X8STi board as it also means i can use the 1366 Hex core Xeon from main PC for testing until i buy one for the NAS. It also means i have two CPUs compatible with two machines which is handy (3 if you count the i7 which is back in the PC where it was). Currently using the inbuilt board disk controller and USB stick for boot drive.
Also bought and received 12Gb of ECC Memory (all the info is pretty clear ECC is a must so why ignore sage advice when you don't need to) however misread the listing which described it as "not unregistered" - me misreading the "un" part and double negative at 1am on eBay resulted in 3 sticks of registered and incompatible memory arriving :(
I am currently using non-ECC from my main PC (don't all shout, first please research the words "temporary" and "development" if you feel like shouting) and the system has been running well.
I know these are not the latest greatest components however things have been working well these last few days. Many users are also currently using this generation of components so when the comments come back about building a system with older parts, ill be interested to see what those running with this era of parts already say about it... :)
Have had the system being hit for the last 12 hours with CIFS read and write from 2 PC's (both gigabit). and also transcoding various movies to 6 separate devices. CPU usage was touching 80% in places and Ethernet bandwidth has sat in the region of 850-950Mbps without a hiccup to the streaming.
Once the correct memory arrives, ill get some stress testing etc done inline with the various guides.
