From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Jan 3 12:19:54 2009 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 C4B811065673 for ; Sat, 3 Jan 2009 12:19:54 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from frederique@isafeelin.org) Received: from smtp08.online.nl (smtp08.online.nl [194.134.42.53]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 854658FC08 for ; Sat, 3 Jan 2009 12:19:54 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from frederique@isafeelin.org) Received: from smtp08.online.nl (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by smtp08.online.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP id CB82F6602D for ; Sat, 3 Jan 2009 13:19:52 +0100 (CET) Received: from [192.168.1.15] (s55919a03.adsl.wanadoo.nl [85.145.154.3]) by smtp08.online.nl (Postfix) with ESMTP for ; Sat, 3 Jan 2009 13:19:52 +0100 (CET) Message-ID: <495F57E5.7040905@isafeelin.org> Date: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 13:19:49 +0100 From: Frederique Rijsdijk User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (Windows/20081209) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: <495E17AD.30707@isafeelin.org> <20090102160727.A38841@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl> <495F2919.6040103@isafeelin.org> In-Reply-To: <495F2919.6040103@isafeelin.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Online-Scanned: by Cloudmark authority (on smtp08.online.nl) Subject: Re: Using HDD's for ZFS: 'desktop' vs 'raid / enterprise' -edition drives? 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: Sat, 03 Jan 2009 12:19:55 -0000 After some reading, I come back from my original idea. Main reason is I'd like to be able to grow the fs as the need develops in time. One could create a raidz zpool with a couple of disks, but when adding a disk later on, it will not become part of the raidz (I tested this). It seems vdevs can not be nested (create raidz sets and join them as a whole), so I came up with the following: Start out with 4*1TB, and use geom_raid5 to create an independent redundant pool of storage: 'graid5 label -v graid5a da0 da1 da2 da3' (this is all tested in vmware, one of these 'da' drives is 8GB) Then I 'zpool create bigvol /dev/raid5/graid5a', and I have a /bigvol of 24G - sounds about right to me for a raid5 volume. Now lets say later in time I need more storage, I buy another 4 of these drives, and 'graid5 label -v graid5b da4 da5 da6 da7' and 'zpool add bigvol /dev/raid5/graid5b' Now my bigvol is 48G. Very cool! Now I have redundant storage that can grow and it's pretty easy too. Is this OK (besides from the fact that graid5 is not in production yet, nor is ZFS ;) or are there easier (or better) ways to do this? - So I want redundancy (I don't want one failing drive to cause me to loose all my data) - I want to be able to grow the filesystem if I need to, by adding a (set of) drive(s) later on. -- FR