[zfs-discuss] Expanding a RAIDZ based Pool...

2007-12-10 Thread Karl Pielorz

Hi,

I've seen/read a number of articles on the net, about RAIDZ - and things 
like Dynamic Striping et'al. I know roughly how this works - but I can't 
seem to get to the bottom of expanding existing pool space, if this is even 
possible.

e.g. If I build a RAIDZ pool with 5 * 400Gb drives, and later add a 6th 
400Gb drive to this pool, will its space instantly be available to volumes 
using that pool? (I can't quite see this working myself)

Other articles, talk about replacing one drive at a time, letting it 
re-silver, and at the end when the last drive is replaced, the space 
available to volumes will reflect the new pool size (i.e. replace each 
400Gb device in turn with a 750Gb device - when the last one is done, 
you'll have a 5 * 750Gb pool with all the space (minus RAIDZ overhead) 
being available).

I know I can add additional RAIDZ pools to the volume - but that's only any 
good for adding numbers of multiple drives, not singles (if you want to 
continue fault tolerance).

Thanks,

-Karl
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Re: [zfs-discuss] Expanding a RAIDZ based Pool...

2007-12-10 Thread Adam Leventhal
On Mon, Dec 10, 2007 at 03:59:22PM +, Karl Pielorz wrote:
 e.g. If I build a RAIDZ pool with 5 * 400Gb drives, and later add a 6th 
 400Gb drive to this pool, will its space instantly be available to volumes 
 using that pool? (I can't quite see this working myself)

Hi Karl,

You can't currently expand the width of a RAID-Z stripe. It has been
considered, but implementing that would require a fairly substantial change
in the way RAID-Z works. Sun's current ZFS priorities are elsewhere, but
there's nothing preventing an interested member of the community from
undertaking this project...

Adam

-- 
Adam Leventhal, FishWorkshttp://blogs.sun.com/ahl
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