ZFS under FreeBSD on commodity hardware

[ocabj]

I'm still pondering my own personal storage/archiving options and looking into going back to FreeBSD since ZFS appears to be fully supported and maintained under FreeBSD.

Is anyone here using ZFS volumes under FreeBSD using commodity hardware?

Any IOPS issues with commodity hardware (e.g. consumer SATA drives on the mobo chipset)?

Any significant maintenance differences of ZFS under FreeBSD vs Sun Solaris?

[bill_k_lopez]

What is your purpose/goal for using ZFS? And why wouldn't you just go with Solaris???

[ocabj]

Data integrity. I've become disillusioned with large hardware RAID arrays (e.g. RAID5) and have found ZFS to be a better option.

I've never been a fan of Sun/Solaris, especially when it comes to development environments. FreeBSD has always been easier to maintain, at least for me. I still prefer FreeBSD over Linux.

[Merc1138]

Really depends on your motherboard chipset. Onboard Intel SATA controllers are ok, Marvell SATA controllers are garbage, so you'd pretty much run into a wall for IOPS if you had drives spanned across both. Using an LSI controller(keeping the option ROM disabled in the BIOS and just using it as a SATA/SAS controller for ZFS) in a PCI express slot would be a much better option.

[speedrrracer]

JBOD + ZFS here at work for a 32-node Hadoop cluster running on mismatched 1 & 2U castoffs collected from various scrapheaps and abandoned projects. Two thumbs up.

We run Linux, however, so can't speak to the FreeBSD thing.