On 4/29/2014 5:30 AM, Mark Haney wrote: Hello, Because of license incompatibility zfs can not be distributed with the linux kernel. However a work around as been found by providing zfs as a kernel module,etc and ZFS for linux is ready for wide spectrum deployment; from desktop to supercomputers. https://groups.google.com/a/zfsonlinux.org/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/zfs... http://zfsonlinux.org/

On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 03:44:26PM -0500, Javier Perez wrote: I'm not sure Red is more reliable than Black. The Black drives have 5 yr warranties, whereas the Red drives have 3 yrs. -- Suvayu Open source is the future. It sets us free.

On 28.04.2014, Javier Perez wrote: In my experience, that's a bad idea. USB-sticks are not reliable over a longer period, and you can expect data loss. Just put the OS on one of the SATA disks. While I'm with you to not use LVM, what's the problem with rsync'ing your data to your new disks? And be aware that I'm highly biased as a long time user of XFS, but that's what I would suggest. What matters is reliability, and nothing beats XFS. Period :-) S.a. I would never use it. S2D takes almost as long as a full reboot, and has shown to not be reliable on some machines. S2R would be an alternative. Keep it simple. Just put the OS on one of the disks, use XFS and be happy :-)

| From: Javier Perez <pepebuho(a)gmail.com&gt; | I know, but I wanted the famous speed a SSD/flash system is supposed to | give for the OS. Specially given that it is an old system. I could be wrong, but I think - most USB sticks are quite slow. - USB2 sticks are guaranteed to be slow-ish - USB sticks seem to have low reliability. The seem to be designed for a different usage pattern (not continuous). - I've had trouble booting from USB3 sticks in USB3 ports. I think that some BIOSes are not ready for this. - USB sticks are easy to knock because they stick out of the port On the other hand, once the server has gotten through startup - for many server applications, access to things that would live on a USB stick are such that RAM caching makes the performance less important.

| From: Joe Zeff <joe(a)zeff.us&gt; | On 04/28/2014 10:44 AM, Javier Perez wrote: | > | > Is there anything I should know I am not taking into consideration? | | Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up about 0.5% | of its capacity. It will also be much safer than having it on an external | drive, especially if it's a flash drive. I agree. I always reserve two partitions to be /: one for the current system, and one for the next system. That way I can install a new system without losing the old one. Seems much safer to me. Oh, and I allocate 20G per / to account for future code-bloat. Surely overkill on a server. I don't really know RAID best-practices these days. Big disks are so big that there is a real chance of losing a working drive while rebuilding a degraded array. And manufacturers of consumer drives try to make them NOT work in RAID so as to force business folks to buy more expensive drives (google for TLER). When a disk fails, the array becomes degraded. The redundancy is gone. The first thing to do: replace the bad disk and rebuild the array. Or try to rebuild with the old drive (the error might be transient). Rebuilding can take a large fraction of a day with 3T disks. During that time, a second failure kills you: no redundancy. The fundamental problem is the flawed belief that RAID is a kind of backup. When you get down to it, it isn't backup. So ask yourself: in a home server, just what does RAID give me? Are you really bottlenecked for speed in a way that RAID will improve? Perhaps RAID can help with High Availability (and perhaps not) -- is that what you are hoping for? Just don't think of it as backup.

On 04/28/2014 02:11 PM, Javier Perez wrote: The get a 64Gb SSD internal as you primary device and put all data on a secondary drive.

0.5% of its capacity. It will also be much safer >than having it on an external drive, especially if it's a flash drive. I know, but I wanted the famous speed a SSD/flash system is supposed to give for the OS. Specially given that it is an old system. On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Joe Zeff <joe(a)zeff.us&gt; wrote: -- ------------------------------ /\_/\ |O O| pepebuho(a)gmail.com ~~~~ Javier Perez ~~~~ While the night runs ~~~~ toward the day... m m Pepebuho watches from his high perch.

On 04/28/2014 10:44 AM, Javier Perez wrote: Putting your OS onto a 10 GB partition on that drive will take up about 0.5% of its capacity. It will also be much safer than having it on an external drive, especially if it's a flash drive.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 04/28/14 14:11, Javier Perez wrote: My $0.02. IIRC, I don't think ZFS is supported (or fully supported at any rate) in linux. I just did some research into that and couldn't find anything recent about ZFS support for newer kernels. Granted, I could have just missed it. If you want to use ZFS on that box for data storage, look at FreeNAS. It's fantastic. Of course, it would render that box unusable as a desktop for the most part, but there are various Linux distros that can be run in 'jails' on it that may or may not work for your needs. Second, I wouldn't use a flash drive as your OS drive for a couple of reasons. We've used flash drives as test devices for some ARM boards and the stability wasn't what you would expect. Especially if there is 'normal' OS activity. We ended up having to move nearly all the log files off the flash drive onto secondary storage to keep the drive stable. If you're worried about running out of SATA ports and have a spare PCI/PCIe slot, just add a SATA board. I had to do that with my server at home. It makes more sense to have the OS on small partition either on a mirrored small pair of SATA SSDs rather than a single flash drive.