Critique my DIY Build

[00Roush]

Glad to see EON is working for you. I tested a couple of versions a while back and it seemed to have very good performance with multiple drives. The down side was it was more difficult to setup due to the command line interface versus a web interface. Also I had trouble finding a good guide that went through setting up the drives, shares, and network.

For ZFS expansion I believe you are correct. If you start with a 5 drive RAIDZ zpool and later want to add 5 more drives you would have to create another 5 drive RAIDZ zpool. The benefit of this is now you have two drives dedicated to parity and can survive two disks failing. While having a single 15 drive RAIDZ zpool wastes less space on parity data it provides less protection against drive failures. So breaking it up into groups of smaller RAIDZ zpools makes sense if you are looking for more data protection.

00Roush

 

[travist]

I've been out of town so much, that I haven't been able to devote too much time to testing locally. Much of my testing has been remotely, using RDP over a VPN to conduct local bandwidth tests.

With that said, I did my first test of EON with that configuration. I then destroyed the zfs pool and zpool for some expansion testing, after which I re-created the pool. For some reason, I can't get anywhere near the throughput that I got the first time - now I'm seeing somewhere between 50-60MBs write throughput. I'll keep testing remotely and futher test once I'm back home to see what gives. One thing is that the second time I shared the drives with the zfs set sharesmb=on command, and the first time I seem to remember using the sharemgr command. Don't remember the syntax of the sharemgr command, or what the differences are in the two - but maybe that is this issue. If anyone can chime in on this, I'd like to hear. Otherwise I'll be googling later on.

Due to the performance increase (at least initially), I'd be willing to let this force me to learn the solaris CLI commands, as I think this will help me learn other *nix CLIs easier. That has turned me away from anything non-windows in the past (other than Cisco CLI, which I love!)