Category: ZFS

I have seen a couple questions about ZFS and TrueNAS scaling over on the TrueNAS forums and figured I would recount a large file server I designed and implemented using ZFS back in 2008 or so. The customer had a requirement for one large SMB share with a capacity for well over a million files and 50TiB. Remember, this is 2008 and large hard disk drives (HDD) were 1TB. The only filesystem we found that would scale that far and not have serious performance issues was ZFS. They only needed 3 or 4 users accessing it at one time. The...

I see some of the same questions come across a variety of mailing lists. Often times the questions are phrased differently, but they are essentially asking the same things over and over again. This is not a bad thing as new people are introduced to ZFS and start asking about it. I find that I am sending people to a number of links where people who know more about ZFS than I have already answered the questions. To simplify giving out all these URLs I am gathering them up here for reference in one place. Expect this list to grow as...

One of the servers I manage is essentially a file server. There are two SSD boot devices and 16 data drives. The configuration is five 3-way mirrors plus one hot spare. At one point four of the 16 drives go offline all at once. My first thought is a controller gone bad. There are four controllers in play, the onboard with six ports and three add-in cards with four ports each. But looking at the device names they are not consecutive as would be expected of the four ports on one controller. So it must be something else and I...

As it has been discussed on the ZFS mailing list recently (subscribe here), I figured I would post my most recent observations on resilver performance. My home server is an HP MicroProliant N36L (soon to be an N54L) with 8GB RAM, a Marvell based eSATA card (I forget which one), and a StarTech 4-drive external enclosure (which uses port multipliers). The system is running FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE-p7. The zpool in question is a 5 drive RAIDz2 made up of 1TB drives, a mix of Seagate and HGST. Note that drives ada0 through ada2 are in the external enclosure and ada3 through...