From owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Nov 30 09:45:13 2009 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5374B1065672 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:45:13 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from google@vink.pl) Received: from fg-out-1718.google.com (fg-out-1718.google.com [72.14.220.153]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E4EF78FC18 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:45:12 +0000 (UTC) Received: by fg-out-1718.google.com with SMTP id e12so852053fga.13 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:45:11 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.86.198.20 with SMTP id v20mr3866258fgf.54.1259572801317; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:20:01 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail-fx0-f218.google.com (mail-fx0-f218.google.com [209.85.220.218]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id e20sm13538394fga.17.2009.11.30.01.20.00 (version=SSLv3 cipher=RC4-MD5); Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:20:01 -0800 (PST) Received: by fxm10 with SMTP id 10so2792564fxm.14 for ; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:20:00 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.223.161.215 with SMTP id s23mr669459fax.44.1259572800407; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:20:00 -0800 (PST) Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 10:20:00 +0100 Message-ID: <2ae8edf30911300120x627e42a9ha2cf003e847d4fbd@mail.gmail.com> From: Wiktor Niesiobedzki To: freebsd-fs Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Subject: ZFS guidelines - preparing for future storage expansion X-BeenThere: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Filesystems List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:45:13 -0000 Hi, I'm planning to setup a ZFS pool and trying to get best practices for that, so the layout I'll propose, will be future proof. As far as I read ZFS Best Practices it is advised to use whole disk as a vdev instead of silces/partitions to ease the administration. I'm trying to setup a RAIDZ pool, that I may want to grow some day (by replacing all disks in the pool). So i made a quick check on 8.0 Release, and did the following: create 3 disks - each of size 256M - da0, da1, da2 # zpool create tank raidz da0 da1 da2 It gave a tank of size ~750M Then I created another 3 disks, each of size 512M - da3, da4, da5, and # zpool replace tank da0 da3 # zpool replace tank da1 da4 # zpool replace tank da2 da5 But size of the tank haven't changed. As it was mentioned few times on the list, that you need only to change all of the disks to get the new storage, do I need to do something more, to get new space used by RAIDZ? Because otherwise, I'd suggest, that on FreeBSD, it should be advised, to always use slice/partition, so when you replace the disk with bigger one, you create two partitions, and stripe two raidz. But this in turn, after few such exercises may lead to quite complicated layout. Ofcourse - the easiest way would be to setup a whole new pool and move the data, but that might be hard thing to do at this time, as I might be lacking controller to connect all six devices on the same time, so I was rather thinking about replacing the disks one-by-one Is my use-case falling on the case, described here: http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/expand_o_matic_raid_z , as a "home user to want to increase his total storage capacity by a disk or two at a time"? Any hints for me? Cheers, Wiktor Niesiobedzki