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Ten’s Complement finally got back to me today, and added me to their beta tester list. I’m not sure what that means for now, but hopefully I can get access to their new products and put them through their paces. supposedly they are doing a full ZFS platform, including my favorite technology, reduplication.

I have been considering upgrading my old infrant chassis for a while now. It works great, but it’s painfully slow. Its been efficient and very reliable for me. Netgear continues to update the firmware to this day with new features and bug fixes. It has been a great investment.

That being said, spending 600 dollars on a new chassis is more expensive than actually building a full machine and tossing the drives in it. Believe me, I fully understand the cost tradeoffs here. I understand there is a lot to be said the the dividends and time savings on the backend. Still, I have held off.

Then, this christmas the family was especially generous. I picked up a few Newegg gift cards, and decided to redeem them for a Thermaltake level 10 gt. It has a ton more space than my original chassis from over two years ago, along with numerous hot swap drive bays.
I had a few drives kicking around, so I tossed them in the extra slots and played around with setting up a software array in OS X. It worked out fine, but the redundancy options were limited to RAID 1. I looked around for something more interesting.

Today I came back across an old project I had completely forgot about, ZFS. If you are not familiar with it, you should go look it up. Its possibly one of the best fundamental technologies out there for hard drive systems. Apple was working on embedding it into OS X for a few years, but had to abandoned the idea after licensing fell through after the Oracle/Sun Merger. I found there was an open source port of what apple had been working on, and that a prepackaged installer was available.
I went ahead and downloaded it and tossed my spare drives at it. Soon after, I had a nice large pool of raid5 equivalent storage just beckoning for my data. I started tossing files at it and was quite surprised at the performance. Using 4 drives I’m pushing over 200 mb a sec through the array on write. Considering this is all running in software, its pretty good.

ZFS supports tons of advanced features, and easily allows for in-place expansion using larger drives.

I may have finally found a very interesting infrant replacement.