XigmaNAS

Hello all,

I'm not to DIY NAS, NAS4Free, ZFS, and am getting ready to install NAS4Free this weekend. I've been reading up on ZFS and optimal number of drives, and I noticed on this page https://calomel.org/zfs_raid_speed_capacity.html there is no mention of using 8 drives. I was going to use 8 HDD's in my enclosure, but now I'm going to reconsider. What is the reason 8 HDD's is not supported?

Any info, links would be greatly appreciated.

Thanx.

--nixIT

It is supported and will work very well! You will get faster performance if the number of data drives is a power of 2. But with current hardware and disks your bottleneck will probably end up being the network.

thanx!

The "optimum" number of drives for ZFS vs raid levels hearsay has been proven to be a fallacy. As erico said, your network connection will most likely be the limiting factor in your systems overall performance.

Just make sure that you use double parity with 8 drives and do proper burn in tests before putting it in production.