Hello everyone, I'm new to ZFS and OpenSolaris, and I've been reading the docs on ZFS (the pdf "The Last Word on Filesystems" and wikipedia of course), and I'm trying to understand something.
So ZFS is self-healing, correct? This is accomplished via parity and/or metadata of some sort on the disk, right? So it protects against data corruption, but not against disk failure. Or is it the case that ZFS intelligently puts the parity and/or metadata on alternate disks to protect against disk failure, even without a raid array? Anyway you can add mirrored, striped, raidz, or raidz2 arrays to the pool, right? But you can't "effortlessly" grow/shrink this protected array if you wanted to add a disk or two to increase your protected storage capacity. My understanding is that if you want to add storage to a raid array, you must copy all your data off the array, destroy the array, recreate it with your extra disk(s), then copy all your data back. I like the idea of a protected storage pool that can grow and shrink effortlessly, but if protecting your data against drive failure is not as effortless, then honestly, what's the point? In my opinion, the ease of use should be nearly that of the Drobo product. Which brings me to my final question: is there a gui tool available? I can use command line just like the next guy, but gui's sure are convenient... Thanks for your help! -Steve This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
