Hello all,

At the moment i'm building a home made nas/media server running ubuntu. After reading some articles about ZFS I decided to use it (at first on a virtual machine).

the machine is gonna be a AMD fusion with two 1TB disks and one 64GB ssd for the OS

This is what im trying to accomplish:
I've got a bunch of data that I realy like to hold on to (so mirroring would be nice) and I got a bunch of movies (not realy important)
So to get the max out of the two disks I want to split them both and and mirror the first partition of both disks and stripe the second pratition of both disks (so i get 1,5TB of usable data)

What I did:
added a partition table to both disks and created two ext2 partitions on both disks (couldn't make a zfs partition or I don't know how to in linux)
then i created a mirrored zfs pool of the first partitions and a striped zfs pool of the second partitions
it all seems to work great, but my question is is this the best way to do it (my doubt is the pools using the two ext partitions)

thanks in advance

It will work. ZFS will reformat those partitions anyway, so they are not "ext" anymore.

Cool thx for the fast reply

Instead of installing the OS on the SSD, you might have better installing the former on a dedicated partition (or on ZFS if supported) and using the SSD as ZFS L2ARC cache.

Thats not a bad idea, but i want my os on a dedicaded disk and load it into ram and make the disk read only (so the os wont get damaged by normal use, it's somthing like the windows embedded enhanced writer filter but then for linux).
Is it possible to split the ssd aswell and use only half the disk for chache, and can the cache be used for multiple pools?
What's the minimum size for the cache to be usefull?

Of course it could be split into multiple partitions (it is just a disk from the system's view side after all). What you have to keep in mind is that L2ARC is a device dedicated for particular pool, so if you will have two zpools and you want to have cache device in both of them, then you have to split that SSD disk at least into two pieces (three if you also want system there, but I think it is quite a waste for that disk, especially if you will later load the system into RAM).

As you want to use a RAM based OS supporting ZFS, you might be interested with the EON project (faq).