I didn't know that Windows has a similar technology to ZFS L2ARC which is called ReadyBoost. Nice.
I'm building my new home NAS server and I'm currently seriously considering putting OS on an USB pen drive leaving all sata disks for data only. It looks like with modern USB drives OS should actually boot faster than from a sata disks thanks to much better seek times. I'm planning on doing some experiments first.
You should, if not for max raw speed the gain in much lower latencies are significant. The "opensolaris" dataset compresses to half the size, increasing the total throughput. Plus it won't compete for disk access with your data.
ReplyDeleteI running my laptop from a TS16GSDHC6-S5W for over a year and I'm not looking back... specially now that the internal HD has troubles spinning up from cold boot.
I'm in the process of speccing out a small NAS box as well, possibly based on Atom D510 CPU, 4GB mem and 4 internal 1.5TB SATA disks, SSD for L2ARC and boot from USB. The reason for using a small slowish CPU is really only power consumption, with todays electricty prices it actually gets quite expensive to run a NAS box with a decent CPU.
ReplyDeleteI'd be interested in hearing what hardware you will be using.
lasseoe: I will be blogging about my new home NAS soon I guess. I bought HP Proliant ML115G5 and so far I really like it! And the price is a little bit over 200 pounds here in UK.
ReplyDeleteI tried to do this, but I ended up with some really strange bugs. After a few hours of uptime the thumb drive would "disappear" and the system would become unusable. http://twitpic.com/13fw18
ReplyDeleteToo bad. The SuperMicro X7SPA-H is a really nice little board. If it wasn't so unstable under opensolaris it would be ideal for a home ZFS server.
Don't be so sure. Flash controllers used in USB thumbdrives are pathetically slow, even when connected via eSATA:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/esata-thumb-drive,2367-9.html
Less than 30 IOPS when writes are mixed with reads.