Not sure what the original requirements were, but if you simply want a robu=
st filer, you may want to take a look at FreeNAS. It is a very mature turnk=
ey BSD distribution that turns a machine into a NAS device. Makes heavy use=
 of ZFS.

http://www.freenas.org/

-Pete

On Jan 2, 2012, at 7:04 PM, V G wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 5:35 PM, Joe Koberg <joe@osoft.us> wrote:
>> Correct. Hardware RAID is "blind" to whats actually in the sectors.  You
>> can do better from a reliability standpoint. ZFS un-layers the storage
>> stack, so the filesystem, volume manager, and storage devices all work
>> better together.
>>=20
>> For example: Outside of idling the disks and waiting for the controller
>> to "patrol read" the entire disk surface, how do you read-verify both
>> halves of a RAID-1 mirror?  You can't just run through the device with
>> "dd" or whatever, because it will only read half the mirror.  However,
>> the ZFS "scrub" command is intended for precisely this purpose.
>>=20
>> btrfs is promising but doesn't seem ready to deploy in production.
>=20
> Thank you very much for the replies. I'm heavily leaning towards the
> usage of ZFS via BSD at this point. Still working out some usage
> statistics for the kind of processor I need, etc. But the storage
> problem is my biggest question right now. Thanks once again.
>=20
> --=20
> http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
> View/change your membership options at
> http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist

--=20
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist
.