Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

FreeBSD with ZFS root

It’s been a while since I posted here. I’ve been busy with a new job, new house, and a bunch of other things. One of these things was setting up my new file server. This is something that’s been in the works for a long time, as can be seen from the various posts on ZFS. I spent a long time researching this, and finally came up with my solution:

ZFS on Western Digital EARS drives

According to the stats, my previous post was one of the more popular on this site. This was in response to a question I was asking myself before building a NAS box at home. In looking at the components to use in building it, I came across another question. How does one fix the performance of ZFS on Western Digital’s green drives with model numbers ending in “EARS” (WD15EARS, WD20EARS, etc)?

ZFS on different sized disks

Note: Following this is not for the faint of heart. If you aren’t comfortable with partitioning, then don’t follow the steps here. I’ve read many posts on how to handle ZFS/Raid-Z on differently sized disks. The goal is to gain the most disk space availability while still retaining the redundancy of surviving a single disk failure. The posts I’ve read either would achieve the theoretical capacity, or be capable of expansion, but not both.