OT - was Hammer or ZFS based backup, encryption

[Bill Hacker]

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Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 05:19:14PM +0100, Jasse Jansson wrote:
>> On Feb 23, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Bill Hacker wrote:
>>> Robert Luciani wrote:
>>>> Freddie Cash wrote:
>>>>> Booting FreeBSD 7.1 into a full KDE 4.2
>>>>> desktop takes less than 5 minutes.  This is using 3x 120 GB SATA
>>>>> drives in a single raidz1.
>>>> Wow 5 minutes?!
>>>> I don't think I'd be pushing it if I said that seems really slow. :S
>>>> On such a fast machine I'd be irritated if it took over a minute to 
>>>> boot. On my
>>>> 3Ghz Athlon X2 w/ 2Gb RAM, DragonFly boots vkernels, hosting  
>>>> services, and Gnome
>>>> in about a minute with my two 500Gb hammer drives.
>>> One minute 45 seconds into Xfce4 for a VIA C7 @ 1.5 GHz, 2 GB DDR-533, 
>>> all-hammerfs on 2 natacontrol RAID1 'antique' 60 GB PATA UDMA 100 HDD.
>>>
>>> One minute 4 seconds into Xfce4 for an Intel T2130 @ 1.86 GHz 2 GB ? 
>>> RAM, 1 X 120 GB 2.5" HDD, DFLY on 33 GB ad0s1, UFS2 with one hammer  
>>> partition.
>>>
>>> RIADz looks to be the wall-time hog....
>> RAIDZ is known to be slow, even the main developers admit it if you  
>> force them to it.
> 
> I'd recommend the individual seeing ~5 minute boot times try disabling
> ZFS prefetching.  Place vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable="1" in
> /boot/loader.conf and reboot the machine.
> 

For same-box use, I'm happy to use hardware RAID or even a low-level 
(block) pseudo RAID, such as [n]atacontrol.

A good LSi controller or such with decent cache (and battery) can make 
even a marginal fs work faster..

'back in the days of .. '  100 Mbps TCNS (ARCnet), an EISA-bus Novell fs 
with twin CDC Wren IV on twin SCSI controllers (duplexed) was faster 
over-the-wire than any local HDD we could buy for ISA-bus 386'en.

OTOH, Netware had grwon up on ARCnet, cheated by assuming zero-error 
links. Which TCNS, on either fibre-optic or coax actually delivered. 
Unlike 10-Base-T Ethernet of that era...

Bill