So I got FreeBSD 7.1 w/ ZFS on my root file system working like a charm.
I followed the instructions at www.ish.com.au, with some exceptions, which follow after the break.
The cool thing? 1,860 GB of storage space. 930 GB of disk space is being used for automatic ZFS backups (the checksums) to protect my data. Total = 2,790 GB.
Total spent = around B$1,250.
This is 67 cents per gigabyte of better than RAID-5 protected storage. With a CPU thrown in to boot! haha.
I used this as my disk layout:
ad5s1a / 1G
ad5s1d 930G (ZFS)
ad6s1b swap 1G
ad6s1d 930 G (ZFS)
ad7s1b swap 1G
ad7s1d 930 G (ZFS)
Because:
- Rule of thumb, swap space should be 2x your RAM. This machine has 1G of RAM.
- I used the 3x drives as a single large ZFS raidz pool with this command: zpool create tank raidz ad5s1d ad6s1d ad7s1d
Note to self –> I have to tune my FreeBSD install.
No related posts.
2xRAM for swap is a *very* old rule of thumb from when UNIX boxes had 16MB of RAM.
It’s quite normal to run without any swap at all with a decent amount of RAM. All my 4GB FreeBSD boxes run fine without swap.
One reason these days for swap is to perform a memory dump for debugging. This used to until relatively recently, have to be slightly larger than RAM, so to get a full dump you’d need to set swap to at least RAM size. However, since 6.2 minidumps have been enabled with debug.minidump (default in 7.1) where just kernel memory is dumped. Thus even these days, if you want a dump for debugging 64MB-256MB swap is probably more than necessary.
Thanks for the tip GM – I’ll keep this one in mind when I set up FreeBSD boxes.