On 10/14/2018 09:51 AM, ~Stack~ wrote:
> We do a pool of mirrored disks with fast SSD's for our ZFS caching.
> Performance is fantastic and, as I mentioned in another reply, the
> rebuild time of a failed drive (or a resilvering when I upgraded all of
> the drives on the fly without downtime) is way faster than any RAID I've
> ever worked on before (which is quite a few in my career).
> 

That's interesting. I have no experience with SSD caching.

> However, even if performance wasn't great we would still probably be
> using it because of the tooling around ZFS. We utilize a lot of the
> tools it provides for shared file-systems, backups, compression,
> de-dupe, ect.
> 

ZFS is super nifty, for sure :) I still have a small machine (Celeron
J1900, 8GB RAM) running FreeBSD-11.2 from a two disk ZFS mirror.

> Never used ZFS on *BSD. I've only used it on SL7 so I can't say anything
> about an OS difference.

I had a ZFS mirror on SL-7.4 earlier this year. It would occasionally
have a minor problem - mostly stuff that would self resolve but it was
still sort of surprising and a little worrisome that it would sometimes
stumble or fall down. I've used ZFS on FreeBSD on and off for years,
pretty much since the beginning - mostly simple setups on small
machines, and it has steadily grown to be so reliable, in my experience,
that I expect it and trust it to work like any other part of a critical
infrastructure. The problem I recently discovered is that on a
consistently busy machine it can consume a significant portion of the
resources. So I went with SL and a hardware RAID over FreeBSD with ZFS.
I'm curious to see how it plays out.