MC wrote: >> >> Raidz can only be as big as your smallest disk. For >> example if I had a 320gig with a 250gig and 200gig I >> could only have 400gig of storage. >> >> I know it's not exactly an enterprise level question >> but it would help my understanding a lot. >> >> I just want to be sure that buying new disks of equal >> size is not my only option to have a proper raidz >> configuration. >> >> thanks. >> > > This is a good post for the help forum. :) > > Firstly, maybe you should mention what size disks you have :) > > Secondly, to protect from disk failure, you either mirror them or stripe them > with parity. So mirror or raid5 (raidz with zfs). You can do these in > opensolaris sxce as well as bsd (freenas), linux (openfiler), or windows. > Either way you can create a RAID5/raidz with the drives and use excess space > as non-redundant storage. So pick your poison! > > Given the size mentions above, you could:
partition the 200G drive into a single 200G slice. partition the 250G drive into a 200G and a 50G slice partition the 320G drive into a 200G, a 50G slice and a 70G slice. Create a raidz vdev with the three 200G slices, a mirror with the two 50G slices and use the remaining 70G for something else. So you get the middle drive's worth of redundant storage. Ian
