Using HDD's for ZFS: 'desktop' vs 'raid / enterprise' -edition drives?

[Charles Richards]

> think twice before doing.

Why? I've had better luck with ZFS than I've had with VINUM and GEOM  
in the past, and I've put my ZFS "array" through alot of stress.

If his data (photo / video storage) is that important, then perhaps he  
wants to do soemthing else ... but for a cheap way to get tons of  
storage, ZFS can't be beat.

ZFS has got it's caveats and gotchas - you *must* tune your FreeBSD  
installation to get stability.

See here: http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide


I'm running a fileserver-in-a-closet (patent pending) on FreeBSD 7.0- 
amd64, with 10x250GB drives in a single RAIDZ2 for my home storage  
needs.

  I'm using old Maxtor SATA150 drives, which are "desktop" class.
Several of them have had to remap sectors while being a part of the  
array, and I've never had ZFS complain, nor had the drive be "dropped"  
by the OS.


I'd suggest that the OP and yourself do some in-depth reading about  
ZFS and how it works. The best documentation I've found as yet is here:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/ondiskformat0822.pdf


Charles Richards
richardsc at gmail.com
charlesrichards.net





On Jan 2, 2009, at 8:07 AM, Wojciech Puchar wrote:

>> Hi freebsd-questions,
>>
>> For personal use (photo/video storage), I'm looking into creating a  
>> huge
>> single ZFS (raidz) volume that will replace my current collection of
>> drives used as storage. I'm thinking 4*1TB drives in RAID5(z).
>
>
>
>>
>> My question is regarding the flavour of drivers that one can choose
>> from: Desktop class drives, or the so called RAID/Enterprise class  
>> drives.
>
> but cheap drives they are OK.
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