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[Matthew Seaman]

On 21/11/2012 17:02, Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Nov 2012 10:52:12 -0600
> Nicholas MIller <nick.kyky at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> My question(s) regard storage.  Depending on which case I end up using or
>> if i purchase a new one, will have access to either 4(four) or 6(six) hard
>> drive bays.  The only things I really *need* redundancy for would be the
>> centralized backups. Which has me leaning towards zfs.  However since I'll
>> probably want to use some of the space from the drives in that pool, but
>> won't need redundancy I'm not quite sure how to proceed.
> 
> 	With that many drive bays, and the low cost of disc space I'd go
> for a big ZFS mirror for storage and put just about everything on it. You
> might have some data that doesn't need to be mirrored but I'll bet there's
> not much that wouldn't be a PITA to lose.
> 

Consider using a RAIDZ rather than a Mirror VDev -- you trade off
essentially low-latency access for small IOs against more available disk
space.  4 drives is OK, but kinda small for a RAIDZ; 6 drives is pretty
much right in the sweet spot.

I'd also counsel against trying to use traditional filesystems and ZFS
in different partitions of the same drive.  ZFS is happiest when it has
complete control of the drive.  You can take a chunk of the drive for
boot code no problem, and using a chunk for swap seems to work pretty
well too.

In fact, if you're going to use ZFS at all, I'd suggest using it for all
your filesystems on that machine.

	Cheers,

	Matthew