Georg Edelmann's Weblog Georg's Weblog

Today, my two Cavalry 1TB USB 2.0 3.5" External hard Drives arrived representing a total investment of 2 x $119.99 purely for backing up my collection on pictures and video. I timed myself on how long it took me to have the drives operational. Here is the run down :

• Step 1: Open the box and unpack : 2 minutes.
• Step 2: plug in the two drives to power, and connect them to the USB port on my server : 1 minutes.
• Step 3: configure the drives as a ZFS mirrors : 5 minutes.
• Step 4: created the Samba share : 1 minute.
• Total : 9 minutes.

Here are the commands, I used :

# uname -a
SunOS piaffe 5.11 snv_100 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-100
# zpool create backup mirror c1t0d0 c2t0d0
... edit smb.conf to add a share ...
# svcadm restart samba
# zpool list   
NAME     SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
backup   928G  91.4M   928G     0%  ONLINE  -
...

I'm impressed. This was very, very easy. I also played around with turning one of the drives off while writing to the ZFS filesystem to see what happens. As expected, ZFS took care of everything. It could not have been any simpler.

As a next step, I'm going look into the kind of performance I can get with this setup.