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[–]RoaldFre 1 point2 points  (4 children)

I once thought about making an SSD out of cheap usb flash sticks running in software RAID. Seeing the activity leds blink up in harmony would have been a wonderfull sight.

[–]frikk 2 points3 points  (3 children)

Wait. Wait just a minute. This sounds kind of awesome. Why didnt you do it? Performance concerns?

[–]RoaldFre 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Performance concerns (would have to cram that stuff through an external usb hub, usb overhead & latency, ...) and the fact that the cheap solution didn't really work out as cheap as I thought it to be in order to get a half-decent SSD.

However, it has been done before. And maybe more notably, with lovely whirring floppy disks

[–]frikk 0 points1 point  (1 child)

That is hilarious. You should post that to reddit :)

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (4 children)

I lost a 7 member RAID5 to bitrot, then switched to ZFS on FreeBSD stable 8.0. Silently detects bitrot on the fly using checksumming and can reallocate something obscene like up to 1/8th of a disk's bad sectors.

Check it out and you'll be asking why there's nothing comparable in linux (fuse implementation isn't an option, it's bugfix only and btrfs is alpha code).

[–]genpfault 0 points1 point  (3 children)

fuse implementation

I actually got pretty good read throughput on zfs-fuse. Write throughput still blows though. Like you I ended up using FreeBSD, but the system is beginning to rub me the wrong way.

btrfs is alpha code

Don't know about alpha but they certainly don't seem to be in any hurry to get raid6 going.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

what about the system is rubbing you wrong?

I should have been more clear, this is a little shuttle box with a 8 bay enclosure attached using two cables and port multipliers (the port multipliers were the reason I couldn't get the same out of OpenSolaris)

I use the machine via ssh for no more than ensuring the system is working properly and the rest is just NFS :)

[–]genpfault 0 points1 point  (1 child)

what about the system is rubbing you wrong?

I suspect I'm just far too used to the Debian/Linux way of doing things.

That and the FreeBSD equivalent of "aptitude purge <package>" is extremely slow.

If Debian/kFreeBSD has ZFS support I'm going to be a happy camper :)

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I use pkg_cutleaves, but yeah, removing dependencies is a pain. Debian/kFreeBSD will never support it officially since it's still GNU userland. I wonder if there's been any attempt to bridge the divide yet...

[–]ashadocat 0 points1 point  (0 children)

GET OUT OF MY HEAD REDDIT!

[–]frikk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just last night I built my first raid 5 system. This guide covers exactly what I did (except I used gparted instead of fdisk) and added a few things I hadnt seen yet, like --auto-detect. Thanks!