> From: zfs-discuss-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:zfs-discuss- > boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Lanky Doodle > > 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.
All of the above is correct. One thing you should keep in mind however: If your unmirrored rpool (usb fob) fails... Although yes you can restore assuming you have been sufficiently backing it up ... You will suffer an ungraceful halt. Maybe you can live with that. > 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. Check the zpool man page for "spare," but I know you can have spares assigned to a vdev, and I'm pretty sure you can assign any given spare to multiples, effectively making it a global hotspare. So yes is the answer. > 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. If that's somehow possible, it's something I don't know. I don't believe you can do that with ZFS. > I am still undecided as to mirror vs RAID Z. I am going to be ripping > uncompressed Blu-Rays so space is vital. For both read and write, raidz works extremely well for sequential operations. It sounds like you're probably going to be doing mostly sequential operations, so raidz should perform very well for you. A lot of people will avoid raidzN because it doesn't perform very well for random reads, so they opt for mirrors instead. But in your case, no so much. In your case, the only reason I can think to avoid raidz would be if you're worrying about resilver times. That's a valid concern, but you can linearly choose any number of disks you want ... You could make raidz using 3-disks each... It's just a compromise between the mirror and the larger raidz vdev. > I use RAID DP in NetApp kit at work > and I'm guessing RAID Z2 is the equivalent? Yup, raid-dp and raidz2 are conceptually pretty much the same. > 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? No. Not unless you make that many separate volumes. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
