Architecture dilemma...

[spooky667]

Hey guys.

Long time reader, first time poster here. I will be building a NAS soon. I got the hardware figured out but I have a dilemma.

-Motherboard is X7SPA with with atom dual core 1.8ghz
-4 gigs ram
-OS on usb stick
-6 x 2TB drives

Should I:

1. Install Solaris and use the 6 drives in RaidZ or
2. Use the onboard raid controller in raid 5 and install something like ubuntu server.

I'm looking mostly for what will give me faster transfer speeds (assume no bottlenecks on the network or clients). The machine will be mostly used as a central file server but will also run services like torrents and upnp. I'm hesitating mostly because I heard good things about ZFS but I'm not sure it will beat raid 5 in my application.

Thanks a bunch!

 

[Jesse B]

From what I've seen, ZFS will beat RAID5 9 times out of 10 when it comes to performance. Others may disagree, but this is just what I've seen personally. The Atom could also potentially be a bottleneck for RAID5, as there's quite a bit of CPU overhead. I'm thinking the same is the same for ZFS as well, just to a lesser degree. ZFS will definitely use more RAM as well, but there are benefits to this, and it ensures your data remains safe.