To Build a Mac Pro ZFS Machine or Not?

Moderators: jhartley, MSR734, nola

To Build a Mac Pro ZFS Machine or Not?

Post by mkush » Tue Sep 25, 2012 5:35 pm

My first post. I'm looking for a solution for my large amount of data, mostly family pictures and video. Measured in terabytes. Currently I have built an OpenIndiana (successor to OpenSolaris) computer, which of course uses ZFS. Currently accessing it via iSCSI from the Mac. It works, and the speed is pretty good, but I wouldn't mind the simplification of having the ZFS volume right on the Mac.

I'm thinking the best box I could build for this purpose would be a Mac Pro so that I could have many SATA-connected drives. By occupying both optical areas, I could have 6 HDDs, assuming I use an OWC bootable SSD PCIe card for the OS. This gets me close to the 8 that I'm running in the OpenIndiana box and would be sufficient for a long time. The drives would be configured as RAIDZ or RAIDZ2.

Anybody running Zevo CE on a Mac Pro with lots of drives? Anybody see any issues? Any bright ideas on using something less expensive like an iMac but still having 4-6 drives directly exposed to the OS?

And... thanks to Don Brady and all involved for this. I love Macs and I love ZFS, so the two need to be together. Shame on Apple for nixing it!
mkush Offline


 
Posts: 34
Joined: Tue Sep 25, 2012 4:36 pm

Re: To Build a Mac Pro ZFS Machine or Not?

Post by carengel » Wed Sep 26, 2012 8:28 am

Currently accessing it via iSCSI from the Mac.


Hi,

sorry i can't help you because i own a MBP. But may be you can tell me what kind of iSCSI Initiator you are using with your Mac.

Cheers
carengel Offline


 
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2012 4:38 am

Re: To Build a Mac Pro ZFS Machine or Not?

Post by mkush » Wed Sep 26, 2012 8:31 am

Sure. It's GlobalSAN from Studio Network Solutions. I like it, nice interface through the system preferences.
mkush Offline


 
Posts: 34
Joined: Tue Sep 25, 2012 4:36 pm

Re: To Build a Mac Pro ZFS Machine or Not?

Post by carengel » Wed Sep 26, 2012 9:04 am

Thanks. I hoped you know another initiator than globalSAN or Atto. I tried GlobalSAN with FreeNAS 8 and it had slower transfers than using AFP-Shares. My otter "test-scenario" with globalSAN was Win 2012 Server Datacenter (as Target). I could connect with GlobalSAN but didn't see a new disk in OS X. An error many customers reported in their forum.

Sorry, for OT at all.

Thanks for ZFS on Mac.
carengel Offline


 
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2012 4:38 am

Re: To Build a Mac Pro ZFS Machine or Not?

Post by wonkywonky » Wed Sep 26, 2012 11:22 pm

mkush wrote:I'm thinking the best box I could build for this purpose would be a Mac Pro so that I could have many SATA-connected drives. By occupying both optical areas, I could have 6 HDDs, assuming I use an OWC bootable SSD PCIe card for the OS. This gets me close to the 8 that I'm running in the OpenIndiana box and would be sufficient for a long time. The drives would be configured as RAIDZ or RAIDZ2.

Anybody running Zevo CE on a Mac Pro with lots of drives? Anybody see any issues? Any bright ideas on using something less expensive like an iMac but still having 4-6 drives directly exposed to the OS?


Not a Mac Pro, but I'm running a Hackintosh w/ 12 x 2.5" drives as a storage server. 8 for media storage, 4 for system backups. I have 6 SATA ports on my ITX motherboard, and 8 more available via an ATTO ExpressSAS host bus expander.

My Hackintosh desktop has five 2.5" drives, two of which are running a ZFS mirror as a data archive.
wonkywonky Offline


 
Posts: 25
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 11:33 pm

Re: To Build a Mac Pro ZFS Machine or Not?

Post by elfpltfn » Thu Sep 27, 2012 4:42 pm

I also have a hack- (in a nice g5 case) w/ 10 drives. Works great.
elfpltfn Offline


 
Posts: 23
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 9:52 pm

Re: To Build a Mac Pro ZFS Machine or Not?

Post by mkush » Thu Sep 27, 2012 6:21 pm

Wow... 10 3.5" drives? How'd you fit those in there? Or external?
mkush Offline


 
Posts: 34
Joined: Tue Sep 25, 2012 4:36 pm

Re: To Build a Mac Pro ZFS Machine or Not?

Post by flight16 » Fri Sep 28, 2012 12:08 pm

I was in the exact same situation as you (only 4 HDDs - 2TB x 4 in ZRAID, and AFP instead of ISCSI). I ditched OpenIndiana, bought a Mac Pro, and haven't looked back. It is a truly wonderful setup.

I ran Aperture and iTunes off the Zevo beta for 4 months one year ago when it was in Beta with not a single problem. After installing Zevo CE and running it on the Mac Pro since the day it came out, I have yet to run into any problems beyond one kernel panic on shutdown (didn't lose any data, have yet to see that happen again). Normal use for me includes iTunes and Aperture.

As far as the 8 drives, you could go multi-lane sata cad and external enclosure, or upgrade to some 4TBers (assuming that's not what your 8 drives are).

I would recommend the Mac Pro over a Mini or iMac due to the ECC memory. ZFS provides such excellent end-to-end data integrity and self-healing, it would be a shame to have a flipped bit in memory ruin it all.
flight16 Offline


 
Posts: 4
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2012 12:52 am

Re: To Build a Mac Pro ZFS Machine or Not?

Post by si-ghan-bi » Fri Sep 28, 2012 12:45 pm

si-ghan-bi Offline


 
Posts: 145
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2012 5:55 am

Re: To Build a Mac Pro ZFS Machine or Not?

Post by mkush » Fri Sep 28, 2012 1:09 pm

flight16 wrote:bought a Mac Pro, and haven't looked back
Good to know. So your Mac Pro setup has how many drives? Four in a RAIDZ or are you running more? I think my idea of six should be fine.

Aperture and iTunes are very important for me too.

I had (yesterday) given up on the Mac Pro idea because it seems too old and expensive, but a suggestion to look at used has reignited my desire to go that way. Looks like you can get a 2009 quad-core 2.66 model for about $1200 on fleaBay, flash the firmware to make it think it's a 2010, and put in a 3.33GHz six-core chip which is ~$550 new, and you've got the equivalent of a $3000 new machine. Add lots of good quality third-party RAM to match the CPU and it's a great machine. I even looked at doing a dual CPU setup (get a 2009 eight-core and upgrade to dual six-core) but it looks trickier and the CPUs are still very expensive (like $1200 each). So the six-core seems like the sweet spot.

I agree on the ECC, and built my OpenIndiana box with that too. Very important. If you're going to be a data perfectionist, might as well do it right!

The HDDs are 4TB already. Six in a RAIDZ2 config in a Mac Pro will provide 16TB, which will be enough for a while. *BUT* I still need to know if that config will violate the 16TB limit in the CE. It's 16TB usable, but 24TB raw. PLEASE, someone answer that question. I posted it in another thread already but no answer.
mkush Offline


 
Posts: 34
Joined: Tue Sep 25, 2012 4:36 pm

Next

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: ilovezfs and 2 guests

cron