> On Thu, 24 May 2007, MC wrote: > > > An advantage Linux has over both Solaris and > Windows is that Linux > > software RAID supports adding disks to an existing > array. > > Bzzzt...wrong answer. ZFS supports software RAID > (zraid) and allows you to > toss disks at the pool in any way you want. You can > add them in pairs and > mirror them, just toss them in, or do a number of > other things with them > such as creating serpate pools and/or filesystems.
I don't believe that is the case. What I'm talking about is "growing an array with devices". So you have 3 disks in a raid5/raidz array, and then you add another disk, causing the free space on the array to grow from (3-1) disks worth of space to (4-1) disks worth of space. Data is preserved across this growth. Linux can achieve the above with four commands. They amount to expanding the array into the extra disk, and then expanding the file system into the full array. ( http://scotgate.org/?p=107 ) This topic has come up many times on the ZFS forums, and even then it is hard to get a straight answer. I blame that on a non-standard vocabulary surrounding these topics. Grow, array, pool, etc... lots of confusion and ambiguity there. But by the end of each question thread, an authoritative answer shows up: http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=108195#108195 So unless something has changed since April, only Linux (and a number of hardware solutions) support growing raid5 arrays with devices. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
