From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Apr 10 18:14:06 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 324A31065672 for ; Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:14:06 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: from dan.emsphone.com (dan.emsphone.com [199.67.51.101]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EA3B08FC27 for ; Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:14:05 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: from dan.emsphone.com (smmsp@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by dan.emsphone.com (8.14.2/8.14.2) with ESMTP id m3AIE3NM014410 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NO) for ; Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:14:03 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dan@dan.emsphone.com) Received: (from dan@localhost) by dan.emsphone.com (8.14.2/8.14.2/Submit) id m3AIE3jX014385 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:14:03 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from dan) Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2008 13:14:02 -0500 From: Dan Nelson To: FreeBSD Mailing Lists Message-ID: <20080410181402.GA4704@dan.emsphone.com> References: <20080410174523.GA5450@phoenix.nasreddine.info> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20080410174523.GA5450@phoenix.nasreddine.info> X-OS: FreeBSD 7.0-STABLE User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.17 (2007-11-01) Subject: Re: ZFS question... X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:14:06 -0000 In the last episode (Apr 10), Wael Nasreddine said: > Hello list, > > I have 3 external USB hard disks hooked to my server, serving media > files via NFS, SSHFS and samba to my local network, laptops and > Playstation 2, the sizes of these hard disks are 160Gb, 500Gb and > 750Gb, the 160Gb has no space left, my archive of Movies is on it, the > 500Gb will soon run out of space it has my archive of TV series and > anime but the 750Gb is almost empty, it has only a few Gigs for my Mp3 > collection anyway I hate to have movies/series everywhere so I thought > of combining them into one big array... RAID0 isn't an option, RAID5 > could be but since the smallest one is 160Gb the size of the array > will be 320Gb which is ridiculous in my case... So I thought of having > a ZFS over the 3 drives, but I don't know what size should I expect > and how/where can I mirror or mirroring isn't possible for me?? You don't necessarily need ZFS for this; gmirror would work just as well. You can split your 750GB drive into three partitions/slices/whatevers: 160GB - mirror this with your physical 160GB disk 500GB - mirror this with your physical 500GB disk 90GB - leftover unmirrored, use at your peril ZFS would let you take those two mirrored vdevs and stripe them into a single pool, but then again you could use gstripe or gconcat for that. The main benefit to ZFS would be if you regularly crash the system; fscking a 750gb UFS filesystem could take a while. -- Dan Nelson dnelson@allantgroup.com