On Tue, 20 Nov 2007, Tim Cook wrote:
So I have 8 drives total.
5x500GB seagate 7200.10
3x300GB seagate 7200.10
I'm trying to decide, would I be better off just creating two separate pools?
pool1 = 5x500gb raidz
pool2= 3x300gb raidz
... reformatted ...
or would I be better off creating one large pool, with two raid
sets? I'm trying to figure out if it would be faster this way since
it should be striping across the two pools (from what I understand).
On the other hand, the pool of 3 disks is obviously going to be much
slower than the pool of 5.
In a perfect world I'd just benchmark both ways, but due to some
constraints, that may not be possible. Any insight?
Hi Tim,
Let me give you a 3rd option for your consideration. In general,
there is no one-pool-fits-all-workloads solution. On a 10 disk
system here, we ended up with a:
5 disk raidz1 pool
2 disk mirror pool
3 disk mirror pool
Each have their strengths/weaknesses. The raidz set is ideal for
large file sequential access type workloads - but the IOPS are
limited to the IOPS of a single drive. The 3-way mirror is
ideal for a workload with a high read to write ratio - which describes
many real-world type workloads (e.g. software development) - since ZFS
will load balance read ops amoung all members of the mirror set. So
read IOPS is 3x the IOPS rating of a single disk.
I would suggest/recommend you configure a 5 disk raidz1 pool (with the
500Gb disks) and a 2nd pool using a 3-way mirror. You can then match
pool/filesystems to the best fit with your different workloads.
Remember the incredibly useful blogs at: http://blogs.sun.com/relling/
(Thank you Richard) to determine the relative reliability/failure
rates of different ZFS configs.
PS: If we had to do it over, I'd probably go with a 6-disk raidz2,
in place of the 5-disk raidz1 - due to the much higher relibility of
that config.
Regards,
Al Hopper Logical Approach Inc, Plano, TX. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Voice: 972.379.2133 Fax: 972.379.2134 Timezone: US CDT
OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) Member - Apr 2005 to Mar 2007
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ogb/ogb_2005-2007/
Graduate from sugar-coating school? Sorry - I never attended! :)
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