With my current server setup (19 3.5-inchers and 3 2.5-inchers), I've gone a different route. I really don't like to think about what an unlucky push to my case, an earthquake, or whatever would result in, with drives suspended with elastic bands inside, bouncing around with active heads wreaking ha...

OK, wife doesn't care so i'll show someone else... First HD suspension with 4 x 300GB velociraptors... Sorry for blurry/dark shots, used camera phone. Very creative, and very nice trick!!! :) One thing though: I notice the slanted drive. I would be very careful to get those drives levelled - that s...

andymcca wrote:

kiblams wrote:I have extra long screws in the underneath of the hard drive which are positioned so that they hook on the cord to stop the hard drive falling out in travel

I really like that idea. Thanks for sharing!

+1 !

I'm still using these cheap elastic bands. These are changed once every 9-12 month. I only use the 1st and 3rd slots. If the bands loosen due to heat, there's still the bands in the 2nd and 4th slots to prevent the drives from falling. BTW, I've a Barracuda IV 80 gb (remember those with the SeaShie...

Why should people stop saying that? The fact that ZFS has no repair programs is true, and that is a very scary fact. ZFS may have improved but it is not perfect, nothing is. ZFS can still screw up and corrupt itself and it will always be that way, it will never be 100% foolproof. ZFS may (I'm not c...

ZFS specifically needs buttloads of RAM not only for performance but for reliability. How much RAM do you have to give to a VM? If you really must go the VM route then MD on Linux or GEOM on FreeBSD (such as FreeNAS) are much better options just for the low RAM usage. ATM, I'm doing a recursive par...

Domb, if you're going with an mdadm solution in virtualized Linux, I recently set up my system to deliver mail warnings using my GMail account. Might be useful:
http://danielsmedegaardbuus.dk/2010-10- ... ding-mail/

ZFS is a filesystem and like most fileystems it will do exactly what you tell it to. If you accidentally delete something, you get a virus, your OS screws up, hardware failure etc, ZFS will not save you. ZFS will write whatever you tell it to, good or bad. It will be perfectly happy to write corrup...

NTFS isn't going to allow me to build a RAID 5/6 type setup thats expandable in any way... hence the initial idea of using ZFS in a VM. Also, no RAID setup will guard you against silent corruption, or corruption in the FS layer. They only guard stripe integrity, and when they fail, they can't tell ...

There is objective information available on hard drive failures. There is unfortunately not nearly as much as we'd need to make rational decisions but some things are not a matter of opinion or of abstract logic. I don't have the patience to go into details here and this is not the place anyway so ...

Was chopping onions, and it struck me, if you're going to use virtual disks anyway, you might want to just use either VMware Server 1 or 2. They're both free, they both install as services, and you can set them up to start and stop specific VMs with the host as it starts up and shuts down. It will e...

Oh, and never-ever enable dedup, even though on paper it is awesome. The performance hit is insane. Future versions may prove better, but ATM, it's performance death.

As discussed elsewhere on this forum, ZFS is poorly suited to archival. I'm sure you meant to write something else? A filesystem is poorly suited to archival? What else would it be suited for? :) Be careful when mixing VMs and filesystems such as ZFS. Google for horror stories... Generally be caref...

a few friendly warnings... for a collector like me, it gives so much piece of mind to know that ZFS will know and fix file errors on-the-fly and that I can always do "zpool status" and see a list of any files that possibly couldn't be fixed even with double parity As discussed elsewhere on this for...

I meant is there anything available that runs natively in Windows that has functionality like ZFS's RAIDZ. Oh, of course :) I'm on the zfs-fuse mailinglist, and this question pops up every once in awhile. Unfortunately, no, not ATM, and nothing I know of is in the works. People have discussed the p...

Just gonna add one more advantage of the middle layer: Drives become larger all the time. When I bought the 500GB drives that are in my fileserver, the were top of the pops. Because I've assembled them using a middle layer, I can replace them over time with larger drives as they fail. And in replaci...

It seems you've done more research into it than me! You have no idea how much time I've used fiddling with this array :D Also, using ZFS, even on FUSE, is fantastic. It's very very stable, and for a collector like me, it gives so much piece of mind to know that ZFS will know and fix file errors on-...

Now I'm thinking of expanding it which is a problem and thought about ZFS again. I could buy 4 x 2TB drives, setup a ZFS volume, copy the data to it, then add the 4 x 1TB drives and voila! One 12TB ZFS volume. Don't forget: ZFS cannot expand "horizontally", i.e. you cannot add more members, but you...

Damn, there are a couple of solutions here that make me wince. A lot of ingenious ones, but not counting the ones where drives are actually dangling around, there's the issue with the ones using just regular rubber bands (not the ones with woven stuff or other fabric around them): Gents, those thing...

...and the final test, using ZFS-FUSE with the same disks in a real Kubuntu OS, yields at least 135 MB/s in the same test (up to 170 MB/s at times).

But still, the VMware numbers are pretty good here!

Okay, for those still interested, I tried the same setup on the same rig with the same everything but using VMware Workstation 7.1 instead of VirtualBox 4.0.2. I haven't been able to access all of my disks as raw disks using VMware Server (neither 1.0.x nor 2.0.x), but Workstation will! VMware Works...

FWIW, and I realize this is an aging topic, I just set up something similar to this. Windows XP x64 host, E2200 @3 GHz VirtualBox 4.0.2 Ubuntu Server 10.10 guest installed with -virtual kernel ZFS-FUSE in RAIDZ2 accessing 7 members via VBox raw disks (writethrough mode, i.e. snapshot independent) Pe...