Tru64 AdvFS

Brad Parker wrote: I have run Solaris at home for a few years now, and I'm also using ZFS. I also run Linux on a different server for different tasks. (OpenSolaris has recently (May 2008) become just as "practical" as Linux (minus about 30% of the driver support Linux has) so you might want to give the OpenSolaris LiveCD a chance.) I am *definitely* using ZFS for long-term archival, as you can be as paranoid as you like about hardware failures: raid-5, raid-6 (double-parity), redundant block copies on the same disk, on different disks, etc. are all supported. The storage is expandable by replacing hard drives one at a time (it is not as graceful as Veritas' "evacuate" function, but they are working on it). Transparent light/realtime compression or heavier/gzip compression on any filesystem if you want it (great for email/text archives). Speed is the best I've seen on any hardware (we use it at work too). However, it is important to never keep all of your eggs in one basket; to that end, I routinely archive to DVD. I used to archive to DLT but the cost and speed became prohibitive once I could get a 16X DVD burner for $30 and quality DVD-Rs for $0.22 a disc including shipping. I have two DLT drives and it is still cheaper and faster to burn discs. (Note that I didn't say easier -- the price for cheaper and faster is my personal time, of course.) I don't agree that you need 64-bit for ZFS. I do agree that you need a minimum of 1G total system RAM for it, preferably 2G, since that helps offload the cost of the parity/crc checks that keep data consistent and ensure that you, the user, never actually *see* any IOs except reading. -- Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/ Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/ Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/ A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/