hardware for home use large storage

[Alexander Leidinger]

Quoting Dan Naumov <dan.naumov at gmail.com> (from Mon, 15 Feb 2010  
01:10:49 +0200):

> Get a dock for holding 2 x 2,5" disks in a single 5,25" slot and put
> it at the top, in the only 5,25" bay of the case. Now add an
> additional PCI-E SATA controller card, like the often mentioned PCIE
> SIL3124. Now you have 2 x 2,5" disk slots and 8 x 3,5" disk slots,
> with 6 native SATA ports on the motherboard and more ports on the
> controller card. Now get 2 x 80gb Intel SSDs and put them into the
> dock. Now partition each of them in the following fashion:
>
> 1: swap: 4-5gb
> 2: freebsd-zfs: ~10-15gb for root filesystem
> 3: freebsd-zfs: rest of the disk: dedicated L2ARC vdev

If you already have 2 SSDs I suggest to make 4 partitions. The  
additional one for the ZIL (decide yourself what you want to speed up  
"more" and size the L2ARC and ZIL partitions accordingly...). This  
should speed up write operations. The ZIL one should be zfs mirrored,  
because the ZIL is more sensitive to disk failures than the L2ARC:  
zpool add <pool> log mirror <SSD1pX> <SSD2pX>

> GMirror your SSD swap partitions.
> Make a ZFS mirror pool out of your SSD root filesystem partitions
> Build your big ZFS pool however you like out of the mechanical disks  
> you have.
> Add the 2 x ~60gb partitions as dedicated independant L2ARC devices
> for your SATA disk ZFS pool.

BTW, the cheap way of doing something like this is to add a USB memory  
stick as L2ARC:
http://www.leidinger.net/blog/2010/02/10/making-zfs-faster/
This will not give you the speed boost of a real SSD attached via  
SATA, but for the price (maybe you even got the memory stick for free  
somewhere) you can not get something better.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?
		-- Socrates' last words

http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137