On the subject of where to install ZFS, I was planning to use either Compact Flash or USB drive (both of which would be mounted internally); using up 2 of the drive bays for a mirrored install is possibly a waste of physical space, considering it's a) a home media server and b) the config can be backed up to a protected ZFS pool - if the CF or USB drive failed I would just replace and restore the config.
Can you have an equivalent of a global hot spare in ZFS. If I did go down the mirror route (mirror disk0 disk1 mirror disk2 disk3 mirror disk4 disk5 etc) all the way up to 14 disks that would leave the 15th disk spare. Now this is getting really complex, but can you have server failover in ZFS, much like DFS-R in Windows - you point clients to a clustered ZFS namespace so if a complete server failed nothing is interrupted. I am still undecided as to mirror vs RAID Z. I am going to be ripping uncompressed Blu-Rays so space is vital. I use RAID DP in NetApp kit at work and I'm guessing RAID Z2 is the equivalent? I have 5TB space at the moment so going to the expense of mirroring for only 2TB extra doesn't seem much of a pay off. Maybe a compromise of 2x 7-disk RAID Z1 with global hotspare is the way to go? Put it this way, I currently use Windows Home Server, which has no true disk failure protection, so any of ZFS's redundancy schemes is going to be a step up; is there an equivalent system in ZFS where if 1 disk fails you only lose that disks data, like unRAID? Thanks everyone for your input so far :) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
