ZFS is worth putting a little thought into your system when you START it. If you want to be able easily add a couple disks at a time, just use mirrors, I user raidz vdevs of 4 and when i need to expand i have 2 options. I add a new raidz vdev of 4 disks OR i replace all 4 disks in one vdev with larger disks. ZFS is amazing, and well worth this method of upgrades. Hard drives are cheap enough these days where you can buy a few at a time, also, i can tell you from experience that when you DO grow a nas you almost ALWAYS want to add a lot more than the last time. My first nas was 3 hard drives, when i added just a single disk i found this to not be nearly enough, i've ended up always adding more each time. I switched to ZFS around 8 disks. I'm very happy with it. The snapshots and clones make your daily usage so much nicer.
I think the ability to grow by a single disk will eventually be added to ZFS but even without it, it is an amazing filesystem and by far the best for my needs. Like i said, if you put a little pre planning into your system, it won't be a major issue, and there is NOTHING wrong with using mirrored groups. On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 11:22 PM, Ty Newton <ty.new...@copperchipgames.com>wrote: > Hi, > I've read a few articles about the lack of 'simple' raidz pool expansion > capability in ZFS. I am interested in having a go at developing this > functionality. Is anyone working on this at the moment? > > I'll explain what I am proposing. As mentioned in many forums, the concept > is really simple: allow a raidz pool to grow by adding one or more disks to > an existing pool. My intended user group is the consumer market, as opposed > to the enterprise, so I expect I'll put some rather strict limitations on > how/when this functionality will operate: to make the first implementation > more achievable. > > The use case I will try and solve first is, what I see as, the simplest. I > have a raidz pool configured with 1 file system on top; no snapshots. I > want to add an additional disk (must be at least the same size as the rest > of the disks in the pool). I don't mind if there is some downtime. I want > all my data to take advantage of the additional disk. > > What is the benefit to the consumer? The answer is simple: > - more flexibility in growing storage i.e. can have an odd number of disks. > - more disk space available for use e.g. 2 pools of 3 disks gives less > available space than 1 pool of 6 disks. > - consistent with many RAID-5 implementations > - opens up the consumer market for raidz: growable small backup/SAN/Home > Theatre appliances > > > I'm no expert on any of this stuff, but I do have many years experience as > a software engineer. Is there a mentoring program that Sun offers so I can > get some assistance when necessary? My expectation is that this isn't > impossible to do but it isn't simple to do either. > > Are there any procedural hoops I need to jump through to take on this piece > of work? > > > Regards, > Ty > -- > 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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