I just got 3 one terabyte HDDs to put into my small NAS box.
I plan on raiding these together with RAID-Z (ZFS, if I'm not mistaken). I've done a lot of research, but there doesn't seem to be very much good information for my questions.
So here they are:
- How easy is it to expand/contract the number of drives?
I am currently adding two drives, but am planning on adding more in the future (also getting a sata card for more ports), how easy is this todo? - Does it hurt performance to expand/contract multiple times?
- What Read/Write speed should I expect? I currently have a one gigabit home network humming along smoothly (so I'm getting 130 MB across), will read/write speeds easily keep up?
- How stable is this on Ubuntu (11.04 x64, server)? It seems like a bit of a hack to get it on ubuntu (though it looks easy), would this be a stable solution?
- How close do I need to pay attention to the dev community? I know many open source projects I use I need to have one ear on the dev community forums, another in the mailing list, etc. Would this product be similar. I'm really hoping for a setup and forget solution, but would this really be the case?
- What is the chance I will loose my data because of a malfunction with this software? (I can understand if drives die, just looking at this software's possibility of fubaring my data)