Switching from Software Raid5 to ZFS

[tomk]

I am considering switching from Software Raid5 to ZFS/RaidZ. Now I wonder whether my hardware would be powerful enough. I am running my NAS4Free on
ASUS M2NPV-VM
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+

In the course of switching I would upgrade my memory to 8GB.

Would this hardware be sufficient to achieve the same level of performance I have today?

Tom

[apollo567]

I think as long as u don't go for encryption your CPU should be fine, but ZFS is greedy for memory, so give it memory as much as you can afford and is possible on the board....

[Lee Sharp]

Maybe... What are you using it for?

You see there are two kinds of speed; Sustained transfer, and IOPS. If you are using it as a file server, or iSCSI device, it will be quite fast. If you are mounting databases, or VM images on NFS shares, you may need to do some work. I did about a week of benchmarking and testing to get VMware performance as good as software raid for a NFS mounted VMware cloud.

[tomk]

I am using it as a file server holding mainly my camera RAW files.

Cheers,
Tom

[Lee Sharp]

Then ZFS will have similar if not better performance than Raid5. The data integrity and snapshots will really be worth it, however.