ZFS, longterm archive of data and Debian
I have been Googling for the last week on file systems like ZFS and the
best way to store and preserve data that needs to be read on a regular basis.
I've read many conflicting opinions, in particular about ZFS, and was hoping
to get some opinions on this list.
Like many music lovers I've ditched the CD player and have a Debian based
music server that fetches music from a big hard drive on my desktop box via NFS.
Most of my music is ripped from my personal collection of CDs I've amassed
over the years. But I've been purchasing quite a few high resolution titles
from online sources such as HDTracks and Channel Classics.
I'm trying to think of the best way to preserve the integrity of these music
files over the long term. I've read good things about FreeNAS and its ZFS
implementation but that would require assembling a separate machine. The
conflicting reports regard CPU power and the amount of RAM one needs to run
ZFS, e.g., 1GB per TB of disk space.
With one user reading one FLAC file at a time from a machine running ZFS
does one need a modern CPU and gobs of RAM? I understand ECC RAM and a 64 bit
OS is recommended.
Can my desktop run ZFS on the discs with the music files and use a separate
disk with ext3 for my daily tasks? If yes, should I run 64bit Debian or just
use lots of RAM and PAE?
Any other suggestions would be appreciated.
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