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Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2010 03:40:36 -0700
From: "Peter" <fbsdq@peterk.org>
To: "Andy Wodfer" <wodfer@gmail.com>
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Cc: freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: FreeBSD and large harddrives
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> On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Peter <fbsdq@peterk.org> wrote:
>
>> I tend to stay away from raid cards.  With ZFS pools all you need is ZFS
>> and any OS [easily move drives around servers], vs. raid cards have to
>> be
>> the same if moving/replacing/card fails.
>>
>> With 'ZFS: do not give it all your HDD'
>> [ http://www.freebsddiary.org/zfs-with-gpart.php ]
>> You don't even need to have drives that are exactly the same.
>>
>> Completely not tied to any hardware....
>>
>
> Wow! I'm learning more and more and I'm really beginning to like ZFS!
>
> Question: What happens if 1 drive out of say 4 fails in a pool? And what
> about hotswapping a (faulty) drive? Is this still possible with ZFS? Can I
> actually replace a Raid 5 setup with a ZFS settup and have the same data
> security if drives fail?'
>
> Cheers,
> Andy

Easily can be done.  zpool mirror on a desktop, I recently just did a
'zpool offline' one of the drives, unplugged it from my sata port, plugged
in another drive, and put it into the pool - all with desktop running. No
esata, just cheap sata controller [biostar mobo] with AHCI enabled in BIOS
and loader.conf. [My version of cheap esata and "offsite backups"]

Make sure to use labels when adding drives to pool. With gpart labels, I
can plug a drive into any port and FreeBSD/ZFS will pickup the label and
no need to worry about putting drives into correct port/controller.

You might want to try raidz instead of raid-5, but I've no experience with
that except for what I've read. [
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID-Z#RAID-Z ]

]Peter[