While it is true that you can not add a single device to a raidz vdev, you can easily add more vdevs, and this is by far the best way to grow because each vdev adds much speed to the array. Raidz is more advanced than raid5, the fact that your card doesn't do the raid calculations is not a limitation, it's a gift. Modern CPU's are much more equipt for handling raid calculation than the "cpu" on your raidcard. As i see it you can do a couple different things.
my system has 3 raidz vdevs each with 4 hard drives and i get AMAZING speeds. Instead of buying a super expensive raid card, i go a cheap card and put the money into more ram/bigger cpu. But even with a raidcard like yours you can take advantage of all ZFS has to offer...just set it up in jbod mode. You don't have to do raidz, you can do mirrored vdevs if you want...these are much faster. did you read the best practices guide? http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 12:17 AM, Chester <no-re...@opensolaris.org> wrote: > Hi guys, > > Previously, I had three 1TB drives in my desktop using the Intel's > southbridge RAID for storage. The only problem with that is every time > Windows Vista took a dump, I would be in jeopardy of corrupting the storage > space; thus, I decided to have a dedicated machine just for serving up > files. > > I now have a 3ware 9650SE 16 port host controller and currently four 2TB > Western Digital WD2002FYPS drives (I also have a leftover drive from an old > machine that's currently the boot drive), Supermicro server MB and a Celeron > 440 2GHz chip (primarly because it's 35watts and I wanted to minimize power > usage when the machine sat idle). > > I was weary about using a Microsoft OS as I wanted it to be reliable and > also didn't want to have to pay for another license, etc. I tried FreeNAS > and it was ok, but somewhat limited in what you can do with it. I have a > squeezebox and would want to install their SqueezeCenter server to server up > lossless compressed audio files. I was also intrigued by ZFS after reading > so much about it. > > I did try around with creating a raidz1 zpool, but then learned that the > current implementation is somewhat limited in that you can't expand the > raidset. Using a raidz storage pool would also not take advantage of the > 3ware's dedicated hardware for computing parity, etc. Anyway, I > successfully created a RAID5 set using three drives and created a zpool. I > then migrated the RAID5 set to add an additional 2TB drive (took 3 days!). > The server is currently down because I needed to use the RAM elsewhere, but > after expanding the storage area, the filesystem still stayed the original > size using the three 2TB drives. I tried finding a way to get the full > space allocation, but it seems that many use simple SATA ports and the raidz > solution. I'm also a n00b, so any advice would be greatly appreciated. If > you think I'm going down the wrong path, I would like to hear it. > > TIA, > Chester > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss >
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