By way of introduction, I own a short-run publishing company and have been producing limited-edition books such as memoirs, corporate histories, training manuals, fine art books and photography books. My projects range from several hundred MBs to hundreds of GBs. I occasionally produce videos, ranging in size from tens of minutes to several hours. I spend most of time in the Adobe CS6 suite. I also dabble in PHP and MySQL programming.
My current rig:
MacPro3,1
2x 3.0GHz quad-core Xeons
24GB RAM
Dual video cards - three panels (2x 20" and 1x 30")
1x 128GB SSD (boot)
4x 1TB HDD (internal, currently in a stripe managed by SoftRAID)
1x eSATA 2x 1TB HDD
Various network storage and several other Macs
I recently recovered from a near-death experience brought on by the boot SSD that just passed the 5500 hour mark and a case of "old firmware" induced freezes and indiscriminate storage errors. Flashing the drive fixed the problem but has brought me to re-examine my storage situation.
This is where ZFS comes in. I'm planning the reconfig while I'm moving data around and need some advice.
I have a spare 64GB SSD that I'm looking to use as either a write or read cache. Which will provide the best bang, given that most individual project files are smaller than 1GB.
Thanks for your guidance and experience. I'm looking forward to extending my tech experience!