XigmaNAS

I'm thinking of building a NAS4Free 10.2 system with ZFS RAID(Something like raid 5?)

I have 3-2TB drives. a WD Caviar Black, a WD Caviar Green, and a Seagate Barracuda Green.

I'm not buying any new drives, so I'm looking for the best, most reliable system with what I have.

Any advice??

RAIDZ1 is the ZFS equivalent for RAID5.
3 different drives of the same size will work, although it is not the optimum setup.

I went ahead and setup a test case with the 3 drives in RaidZ1 and it works. to me this is the fastest NAS I've setup. I'm using a Core 2 Duo E8400 with 4GB of DDR2. I have GB enet everywhere and when I copy to or from the NAS with large files I see about 120MB/sec. Plenty good for my needs, even as Mythtv PVR storage.

I'm still struggling with the meaning of Datasets. I created one, but it just looked like a folder under my Volume. I think all I need to do is create the volume and then create my folders from the individual computers attached to it. I have a lot more studying to do.

as I understand it
a pool is divided into data sets
like partitioning a single drive

I've never bothered as it is not in my needs

jfabernathy wrote:I'm still struggling with the meaning of Datasets. I created one, but it just looked like a folder under my Volume. I think all I need to do is create the volume and then create my folders from the individual computers attached to it. I have a lot more studying to do.

Dataset is the recomended way to create root folders llike Video, Music, etc... because with dataset you can manage other things like deduplication, compresion, quota, etc... and of course you can create using others users not only root as owner.

raulfg3 wrote: Dataset is the recomended way to create root folders llike Video, Music, etc... because with dataset you can manage other things like deduplication, compresion, quota, etc... and of course you can create using others users not only root as owner.

Thanks for the [more] complete explanation
it is probably very useful in larger arrays than mine.