Quiet Mind, how's your server implementation going? I seriously considered one of those little HP microservers but wanted something a little faster. I'm also rebuilding my home quiet/small fileserver now and will post some info and questions separately. Unfortunately it's possibly too late for me t...

Do you know what ZFS does when it runs out of memory? It crashes your system, hard. No orderly shutdown or flushing of buffers, just a kernel panic. That combined with the lack of recovery tools is a very scary situation. WHAT?! :shock: I just read through the FreeBSD mailing list archive and got t...

Wow, washu, well-articulated and thought-provoking, thank you. Does this mean that the ZFS "scrub" operation is useless? You write that error checking at the file system level is the wrong place for it, implying that the right place is at the hard drive level. However, you're also encouraging the us...

Not exactly just one 120mm fan. There's also a wee 40mm fan for the PSU. It's not silent even w/o a HDD, and if you get the same Seagate 7200.12 160gb drive that our sample has, it'll be kind of noisy with a distinct high pitched whine. But definitely a very good deal, and very sturdily, intelligen...

I will be following this build. Have you considered btrfs? I'm very curious about Btrfs. I'm tempted to use it instead of ext4 but I can already feel washu slapping my wrist. I suppose we should wait for the fsck tool to be completed? EDIT: Link aggregation (sometimes called 802.3ad or LACP) is pre...

Why not simply buy servers instead of NAS boxes or desktops? You want to use them as servers, right? You could buy used servers to save money but low-end servers similar to the build outlined in your first post are not that expensive compared to the cost of 16G of RAM (for example). If you bought a...

The advantage of file based checksums/PAR files over something like ZFS is that they are file-system independent. You can copy your files along with the PARs to anything and still verify their integrity. Once ZFS does its mostly useless checksum verification and hands off the data to the OS it is n...

Jay_S wrote:As long as you don't need to grow beyond 4 drives, the HP Proliant Microserver might work for you.

WOW! That's perfect! A whole system that supports ECC RAM for $300! And it's cooled with a 120mm fan! I just ordered two of them; thank you!

Thank you, one and all, for offering your critiques. You've completed changed my thinking. I'm hitting the reset button and starting over. It hasn't escaped me that everyone in this thread is telling me to use a second server. Here's my new plan: 2 NAS devices with 4 drives each (credit: HFat) Mac M...

You want to store 4T on their servers for $5 a month? That'd be some hardcore leeching. Did you think about how much that would cost them? Maybe they can make it work if they have enough customers who pay $5 to upload 10G but you'd be operating on their sufferance. The day they decide they're losin...

I would expand on this as another reason your triple mirroring is a bad idea. One power outage could corrupt the whole array, giving you three disks with corrupt file-systems. Also, while ZFS is generally stable, it's fairly new and relatively untested. There are some pretty scary horror stories ou...

You want to store 4T on their servers for $5 a month? That'd be some hardcore leeching. Did you think about how much that would cost them? Maybe they can make it work if they have enough customers who pay $5 to upload 10G but you'd be operating on their sufferance. The day they decide they're losin...

A second server is somewhere between RAID and backups. That is, it doesn't replace backups. The idea was that you would periodically take drives out of the second server. This way you don't need racks and don't have to worry about hotplugging, breaking your mirrors and so on. Performance would not ...

I have to ask, why the Mac Mini? Why not just serve files over SAMBA/NFS/whatever directly from your ZFS server? If you are so concerned about data corruption then the Mini is just another potential point of failure. Not that the Mini is any better or worse then any other commodity PC, but it doesn...

HFat, Thanks for your opinions. My comments follow: I don't know exactly how these Crashplan and Wuala backups are supposed to work (it might be educational for your readers if nothing else to post links not to promotional material but to descriptions of how one can make them work with multiple tera...

With a single sequential operation, yes. With multiple simultaneous requests and/or random access, a large cache could come in handy. But how often would that happen in practice? Good question. It may very well not. I'm choosing 16 GB so I can max out the board and be done with it (knowing that ZFS...

If anything you should consider your strategy here. If you're so concerned about the data, are you taking into account a backup routine. ZFS parity is *not* a backup. RAID is about performance and uptime. I know ZFS isn't RAID and I would agree that some of its advanced features for data preservati...

If you have definite evidence about ECC support, post it in the ECC support thread please because there's some uncertainty about that with people claiming ECC is (partially?) non-functional with that combination. Done. I'm sure you know what you're doing but I wouldn't equate "utmost protection" wi...

I found a relatively inexpensive microATX board with a non-Xeon Intel processor that supports ( truly supports ) ECC. I'm about to buy it. HFat asked me to post my evidence so here you go: http://www.supermicro.com/a_images/products/X8/3400/X8SIL-F_spec.jpg Supermicro X8SIL-F It supports the Intel C...

Re the PSU -- I don't see the point of going fanless, with so many HDDs and in this particular case. You are better off with a quiet fanned PSU. Go for a fanned Seasonic X if you like super high efficiency -- its fan may never spin up but at least you will have the security. Great, thank you. I'll ...

I'm about to build a home ZFS server because I want the utmost protection I can get for my data. It's going to serve iSCSI to my Mac Mini, which will share files to my home network. In addition to serving iSCSI it will also be compressing the blocks and scrubbing my data weekly. It will house 6 driv...