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Comment by antoncohen | Hacker News Reader

I have been looking forward to this release, but the hardware I want to use it with doesn't exist yet. I want to use a Mac Mini has a filer head, connected to a small JBOD, using the data integrity, compression, dedup, and snapshot features of ZFS.

So to the hardware manufacturers, here's what I want. Either a Thunderbolt to SAS adapter, that basically has an LSI Fusion-MPT card in it, and of course a Mac OS X version of the mpt2sas driver. Then I could connect it to any JBOD. Or, integrate the SAS HBA into a drive enclosure, directly connected with Thunderbolt. What I don't want (dear Promise) is a $2500 drive-less 6-bay enclosure with hardware RAID. I don't want hardware RAID, ZFS will do RAID better than hardware.

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Is there a reason you need MacOS X as your server OS?

Plenty of other options out there which have more testing and have substantial history with ZFS. I'd seriously look into OpenIndiana or similar - I run this with much success on an HP Microserver, which has plenty of expansion possibilities with a small form factor, ECC RAM, etc.

If I was the developer, I'd see about giving away the low end version as a loss leader. As is, charging $20 = less people will test it = less stable.

I wanted to reduce the amount of constantly running computers. I still want a desktop/media center, I wanted to combine that with [ZFS] file server. I'll probably end up running FreeNAS + a desktop. The reason I don't want a FreeBSD or Illumos-based OS as a media center is because of no Netflix streaming support, and Flash performance is poor too.

I'm running ubuntu 11.10 + ZFS for Linux. Works great.

http://zfsonlinux.org/

You'd want to split your front and back ends anyway, assuming you have a large TV somewhere else in the house.

Running MythTV or similar on a ZFS-enabled box that serves as a media archive, then a media optimized ARM or x86 box on the TV would be ideal.

zfs will do all that for you, but do keep in mind, especially for dedup you need a good chunk of ram for the checksum cache and cpu power is a must or it will suck..... zfs is optimzed for big systems, and does not perform well without appropriate resources. with those resources, of course it flies.

The closest you could come is probably an Atto SAS card in a TB enclosure, although that will be expensive.

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