Ok now some solaris handy’s that I need to remember while I am testing my home server setup:

pkg install SUNWgcc ss-dev

That will install GCC and development tools for my machine. So I could install smartmon tools ;) (get smartmon, ./configure; make; make install works!)

# cat /etc/power.conf

device-dependency-property removable-media /dev/fb
autopm enable
autoS3 default
S3-support enable
autoshutdown 30 9:00 9:00 noshutdown
cpu-threshold 10s
cpupm enable poll-mode
device-thresholds /pci@0,0/pci1043,82d4@1f,2/disk@1,0 1200s
device-thresholds /pci@0,0/pci1043,82d4@1f,2/disk@2,0 1200s
device-thresholds /pci@0,0/pci1043,82d4@1f,2/disk@3,0 1200s
device-thresholds /pci@0,0/pci1043,82d4@1f,2/disk@4,0 1200s

That will scale my CPU to a lower profile when he has nothing to do, and also enables my four harddrives to spin down when they are idle.

At this moment the current configuration looks like this:

Intel E7500 Core 2 Duo processor
Asus PQ5 premium
4 * 1 TB 7200RPM samsung F1 drives
Intel bootup SSD 40 gigabytes X-25-V
Intel cache SSD 32 gigabytes X-25-E
6 gigabyte DDR-2 memory.
1 LSI PCI-E x8 2 port SAS controller.

In backorder to have a dedicated zil is a gigabyte I-RAM! Have to wait for this, until now it’s on a 4 gigabyte partition on the Intel X-25-E SSD.

I had the two seagate’s but two disks did not perform the way I would like, and also the disks where 5900rpm and the 4 new disks are 7200rpm. The 80 gigabyte Intel X-25-M I also removed as I have many writes also on my platform and I could see that with every write the L2ARC also writes some stuff to the Intel X-25-M, and that’s why I am shipping in a gigabyte I-RAM, and replace the Intel X-25-M with the Intel X-25-E, and use the I-RAM for the ZIL.

Also the slow CPU was removed due to the CPU load by deduplication and compression. With the faster CPU and the disk changes (and even without the I-RAM) I now get about 280mb/s writes with a 16 gigabyte file created with “dd”, and around 640mb/s of reads when doing it the other way around. With the slow cpu and the other harddrives I was getting around 80mb/s writes and 110mb/s of reads. So a big performance increase. When the I-RAM is in the X-25-E will be relieved of the ZIL log tasks so that would increase NFS/I-SCSI performance a bit when several stations are reading and writing at the same time.

At this moment in time I am running Opensolaris version 133 from http://genunix.org one problem though is that the second internal sata controller (sil based / marvell based) does not work yet. But the 6 ports from the ICHR-10 chipset works great and also the extra lsi controller works perfectly (that will be used for the l2arc device and the zil device). I will update to 134 any time soon.

Also some cool stuff about drive temp and other zfs know abouts you find at http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/