FreeBSD & Software RAID

[Kirk Strauser]

On Monday 25 May 2009 08:57:48 am Howard Jones wrote:

> I'm was half-considering switching to ZFS, but the most positive thing I
> could find written about that (as implemented on FreeBSD) is that it
> "doesn't crash that much", so perhaps not. That was from a while ago
> though.

Wojciech hates it for some reason, but I wouldn't let that deter you.  I'm 
using ZFS on several production machines now and it's been beautifully solid 
the whole time.  It has several huge advantages over UFS:

  - Filesystem sizes are dynamic.  They all grow and shrink inside the same 
pool, so you don't have to worry about making one too large or too small.

  - You can sort of think of a ZFS filesystem as a directory with a set of 
configurable, inheritable attributes.  Set your /usr/ports to use compression, 
and tell /home to keep two copies of everything for safety's sake.

  - Snapshots aren't painful.

It's been 100% reliable on every amd64 machine I've put it on (but avoid it on 
x86!).  7-STABLE hasn't required any tuning since February or so.

UFS and gstripe/gmirror/graid* are good, but ZFS has spoiled me and I won't be 
going back.
-- 
Kirk Strauser