ZFS on Thoughts and Ramblings

FreeBSD with ZFS root

Sat, 15 Oct 2011 02:00:55 +0000

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:

I did consider FreeNAS for a really long time. It is essentially a FreeBSD install with most of the administrative work done for you through a web-based GUI. It hit most of my checkboxes in that it supported ZFS, AFP, Bonjour, and a few others. While this is nice, I found it also to be limiting when one wants to stray off the beaten path. I didn’t want to lose ZFS, but I wanted something where I could tinker. I decided to go with FreeBSD.

ZFS on Western Digital EARS drives

Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:21:23 +0000

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)? I’ve split this into sections, with a bold title, so readers can read the parts that are most interesting. I’ve described why WD changed their drives, why this is a problem, what the solutions are. Hope you enjoy this.

ZFS on different sized disks

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:04:20 +0000

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. I devised a way to get both at the same time, and it’s relatively simple.