Bob Friesenhahn <bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us> writes: >>> With five disks, raidz1 becomes useful. >> >> The three 500gb I have now are all one brand and model number and IDE ata. >> If I were to expand to 5, those 2 would need to be sata or else I'd >> also need to add a PCI IDE controller. >> >> With that in mind would it be problematic to make up the 5 by adding 2 >> sata 500gb to the mix? > > Adding a few more drives so that you have at least five drives would > get you to the point where raidz1 is useful and you will have more > space available.
So is 5 with 1 hotswap (total 6) a sensible arrangement? And would that leave me with something like 2tb (minus manufacturer exaggeration) and one disk would be swallowed for parity data. Also, I'm not getting why a 4 disk raidz arrangement would not be practicle. I see now why 3 isn't smart, with no spc advantage over 2 disk mirror. But wouldn't a 4 disk raidz1 of 500gb drives give about 1500 gb for space where as a mirror setup with 4 500gb would only give 1000 gb. (again minus manufacturer bragging). Or is the needed hotswap for the raidz1 the deal breaker? Meaning it would really take 5 disks to get 1500gb of space in a raidz1 of all 500gb disks. > . . . . . . At the moment there is no way to expand the size of > a raidz vdev other than by replacing all of the disks with larger > disks. You can't add additional drives to a vdev. So you need to > install the drives from the very beginning. So far, I'm still at the point where I can just destroy whatever I've created and start over, since no data has been written to the zpool so far. But what about mixing the 3 IDE ata I have currently with 2 sata (all 500gb) (I have no more IDE controllers, available but do have 2 sata ports available). Is mixing IDE and SATA likely to be a problem? And another thing... if all controllers are full and used in a raidz is it still possible to add a hotswap? Would I pull out one of the raidz drives to do it or what? I understand the hotswap disk would not have to remain in the machine but still, all available controllers would be used for the 5 disk raidz so something would have to come out to be able to add the hotswap disk. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
