[mythtv-users] ZFS - what's the scoop?

[Peter Loron]

On Wed, 2007-10-24 at 09:42 -0400, Brian Guilfoos wrote:
> Craig Courtney wrote:
> > On 10/18/07, *Brian Guilfoos* <mythtv at guilfoos.com
> > <mailto:mythtv at guilfoos.com>> wrote:
> > 
> >     NB, some of us have had problems with XFS, RAID(?), and CentOS.  I had
> >     relatively frequent kernel panics on my system that appeared to be in
> >     the XFS module, which were only fixed by ditching XFS and using ext3 and
> >     slow deletes.  My file server uses CentOS4, RAID5, and LVM.
> > 
> > 
> > I'm currently running 4 250g hard drives in RAID 5 under CentOS 5 with
> > XFS for my recordings and I'm not having any problems.  This is with
> > stock kernel and xfs kmod.  I have a separate hard drive on a different
> > controller with the OS, swap and database running on it.  As always
> > everyone runs different hardware and may have different experiences.
> 
> Thanks for the datapoint, Craig.  I'm reasonably sure that LVM
> contributed to the problem for me.  It's possible the problem was fixed
> in CentOS5, but I know I wasn't the only one.  At any rate, I'm
> reasonably happy with ext3 and slow deletes (and I don't have enough
> storage space to move all 963GB on that array somewhere else to reformat
> with XFS again anyway). :)
> 
> For Peter: it doesn't hurt to try XFS.  I was able to move to ext3 after
> my problems without losing any data because I hadn't filled the array
> beyond the capacity of a single drive on another computer on my LAN yet.
>  When I wasn't having kernel panics, XFS was all kinds of peachy
> performance-wise.

I've been running XFS on a single disk for video storage under FC3. So
far just dandy. I'm going to give it a whirl when I put the array
together. Nothing I'll have on there initially is critical (or probably
irreplaceable, either), so if it goes up in smoke it will simply be
irritating rather than a crisis.

Thanks.

-Pete