[mdlug] [WLUG] building a nas device

[Dan Pritts]

On Mon, May 31, 2010 at 12:46:25PM -0400, Joe Landman wrote:
> >Do not use RAID5 if you care about ALL of your data; you need double
> >redundancy (RAID6) with modern drives.  Why?  You will eventually
> >lose a drive.  During rebuild you are reasonably likely to have a
> >read error somewhere on another drive.  You may get lucky and this
> >is on free space, or it's data you decide you can live without
> >(e.g., if i lose one photo out of the 5000 i've taken, no big deal,
> >but if i lose them all i'd be sad).
> 
> RAID6 or RAID10.

with raid10 you still have a pretty good chance of data loss.

http://blog.richardelling.com/2010/02/zfs-data-protection-comparison.html

This is pretty much out of the realm of what the OP was looking for
though.  

> ZFS's future outside of commercial paid Solaris licenses is very much in 
> doubt.

one answer to this concern is that the existing code can't be taken
back; a freebsd system you build today will work just as well tomorrow.

another is that it's possible oracle will give away zfs to gpl;
they are funding linux's btrfs.

all that said it is certainly possible that future enhancements to
zfs will be proprietary.

basically for carl's a single NAS this is not an issue.  i would
certainly be concerned before designing products around this though
:)

danno