On Jan 24, 2008 8:07 AM, Kava <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 1. Considering the drives are different sizes, would I be better off setting > up 2 x 2-way mirrors separately and then adding them to the pool? Yes. With raidz you will only get the capacity of the smallest disk times (number of disks - 1), or 750 GB. Since this is the same as a pair of mirrors, you might as well use the mirrors, which will likely perform better.
> 2. If I use RAIDZ instead of mirroring, will I always be protected against a > single disk failure (even though the disks are different sizes)? Yes. > 3. With RAIDZ, is there anyway to determine where an individual file resides? > Specifically, is there any way to determine whether the parity information > for the file (or the User Copy) is residing on a separate device/drive? I > know that ZFS 'tries' to do it, but can you check? With raidz every file is striped across all your drives. Writes happen in $blocksize chunks, up to a maximum of 128k. With a raidz vdev these 128k chunks are broken into (number of devices - 1) pieces, and parity is generated from those N-1 pieces. Then the new set of N pieces are written to your N drives. > 4. Assume that 12 months later I want to remove the smaller drives and > replace them with larger (TB) drives. Is it easy enough to remove them > (presumably one at a time) without losing any data? Yes. "cfgadm -c unconfigure old-device", then hot-unplug it and plug the new drive in and run "zpool replace old-device". > 5. Can anyone recommend a cheap (but reliable) SATA PCI or PCIX card? Again, > performance is not that important. I'm using the Supermicro-branded AOC-SAT2-MV8 with the Marvell 88SX6081 chipset. It's worked well for me, except the one defective card I got (look at the archives for details on what happened - no data loss, just annoyingly slow). Will _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
