On Wed, 15 Jun 2011, Nomen Nescio wrote:
Has there been any change to the server hardware with respect to number of drives since ZFS has come out? Many of the servers around still have an even number of drives (2, 4) etc. and it seems far from optimal from a ZFS standpoint. All you can do is make one or two mirrors, or a 3 way mirror and a spare, right? Wouldn't it make sense to ship with an odd number of drives so you could at least RAIDZ? Or stop making provision for anything except 1
Yes, it all seems pretty silly. Using a small dedicated boot drive (maybe an SSD or Compact Flash) would make sense so that the main disks can all be used in one pool. FreeBSD apparently supports booting from raidz so it would allow booting from a four-disk raidz pool. Unfortunately, Solaris does not support that.
Given a fixed number of drive bays, there may be value to keeping one drive bay completely unused (hot/cold spare, or empty). The reason for this is that it allows you to insert new drives in order to upgrade the drives in your pool, or handle the case of a broken drive bay. Without the ability to insert a new drive, you need to compromise the safety of your pool in order to replace a drive or upgrade the drives to a larger size.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
