From owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Wed Jul 8 21:56:41 2015 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@mailman.ysv.freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by mailman.ysv.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B4E899962C2 for ; Wed, 8 Jul 2015 21:56:41 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from quartz@sneakertech.com) Received: from douhisi.pair.com (douhisi.pair.com [209.68.5.179]) (using TLSv1.2 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 (256/256 bits)) (Client did not present a certificate) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 88C8418B5 for ; Wed, 8 Jul 2015 21:56:40 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from quartz@sneakertech.com) Received: from [10.2.2.1] (pool-173-48-121-235.bstnma.fios.verizon.net [173.48.121.235]) by douhisi.pair.com (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 125D03F7A4; Wed, 8 Jul 2015 17:56:39 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <559D9C96.5070601@sneakertech.com> Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2015 17:56:38 -0400 From: Quartz User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20120216 Thunderbird/10.0.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Mario Lobo CC: freebsd-questions Subject: Re: Gmirror/graid or hardware raid? References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.20 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 08 Jul 2015 21:56:41 -0000 > I thought about zfs but I won't have lots of RAM avaliable. ZFS doesn't technically NEED gobs of ram just to function, that's a long standing urban myth repeated by people who don't understand how the ARC and/or dedupe works. You can run ZFS on basically any system, it's just a question of how much it can cache. The less it can cache the more it will have to hit the disks.... but that applies to basically every filesystem. As for raid level, you only have four disks so you don't have a lot of options. You're pretty much looking at a raid-1, raid-10 or raid-5/raidz-1. A 4-way raid-1 is I think overkill, and a bunch of VMs will be heavy on the random read/write so a raid-5/raidz-1 will be worse than a raid-10 performance wise. (Although with only a four disk array the difference probably won't be earth shattering, so if you really need the space a 5/z1 won't kill you).