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

[Steve Bertrand]

dick hoogendijk wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Jan 2009 15:17:30 -0500
> stan <stanb at panix.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 05:48:27PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>>>>> think twice before doing.
>>>> Could you elaborate please ?
>>> ZFS still doesn't work as described ...
>> Is that comment FreeBSD specifc, or aimed at ZFS in general?
> 
> Mind you, ZFS on FreeBSD is not the same as on OpenSolaris-2008.11,
> Nevada or even Solaris 10. On those platforms ZFS generally does what it
> is supposed to do, other than it's still a developing FS.
> On *BSD related systems that is not always the case. Do a good readup.

I had problems with ZFS about a year ago (or so).

Since then, for me, ZFS has been quite reliable:

amanda# zpool list
NAME                    SIZE    USED   AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH     ALTROOT
storage                1.82T   1.21T    623G    66%  ONLINE     -

amanda# zpool status

        NAME        STATE     READ WRITE CKSUM
        storage     ONLINE       0     0     0
          raidz1    ONLINE       0     0     0
            ad0     ONLINE       0     0     0
            ad2     ONLINE       0     0     0
            ad4     ONLINE       2     0     0
            ad6     ONLINE       0     1     0

...with four drives as such (I'd call them 'resi' or 'home-user' quality:

ad2: 476940MB <WDC WD5000AAKS-00A7B0 01.03B01> at ata1-master SATA300

This machine, which runs AMANDA backup archiver, backing up ~8 FreeBSD
servers at about 120Mbps network every night is:

amanda# uname -a
FreeBSD amanda.x 7.0-STABLE FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE #0: Thu Jul 17 15:24:40
UTC 2008     steve at x:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  i386

I've pushed the machine to 686Mbps network @225kpps, including FBSD SCP
and Windows NetBIOS clients while running iperf on other boxen and was
still able to write/read to the storage.

Instead of this one-liner crap 'don't do it' information to the users of
this list, lets begin explaining *why* its not working, and start
providing coherent solutions as to how the OP can work around the issue,
huh?

Steve