From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Jun 7 15:59:36 2013 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:1900:2254:206a::19:1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 541822F3 for ; Fri, 7 Jun 2013 15:59:36 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from quartz@sneakertech.com) Received: from relay03.pair.com (relay03.pair.com [209.68.5.17]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id EC08C17EF for ; Fri, 7 Jun 2013 15:59:35 +0000 (UTC) Received: (qmail 46760 invoked by uid 0); 7 Jun 2013 15:52:53 -0000 Received: from 96.233.79.9 (HELO ?10.2.2.1?) (96.233.79.9) by relay03.pair.com with SMTP; 7 Jun 2013 15:52:53 -0000 X-pair-Authenticated: 96.233.79.9 Message-ID: <51B201D4.3000705@sneakertech.com> Date: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:52:52 -0400 From: Quartz User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20120216 Thunderbird/10.0.2 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: FreeBSD questions Subject: ZFS: raid VS copies=n Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:59:36 -0000 Question: How does the ZFS option 'copies=n' and raid relate to and interact with each other? specifically recovery in the event of a failure. For example, is having three disks in a raid-1 configuration with copies=1 effectively the same as having three disks in a raid-0 with copies=3? Are the copies distributed uniformly across all drives in the pool, or concentrated, or what? What happens with configs like a raid-z2 with copies=2? Which / how many disks can you lose? (I'm aware that like a lot of other ZFS options copies=n doesn't have to be global to the entire pool / directory structure, but for the sake of simplicity let's assume it is in this case). ______________________________________ it has a certain smooth-brained appeal