> One of those EIDE ports is running the optical drive, > so I don't actually > have two free ports there even if I replaced the two > boot drives with IDE > drives.
Yep, as I expected. > I've given some though to booting from a thumb drive > instead of disks. > That would free up two SATA ports AND two hot-swap > disk bays, which would > be nice. And by simply keeping an image of the thumb > drive contents, I > could replace it very quickly if something died in > it, so I could live > without automatic failover redundancy in the boot > disks. Obviously thumb > drives are slow, but other than boot time, it should > slow down anything > important too much (especially if I increase memory). I've seen anecdotal evidence for not using thumb drives, speed, error-prone, logging etc, but maybe someone else can provide some more info. If you have a 5.25" or 3.5" slot outside of your 8-drive drive cage, you could use two 2.5" HDs as a boot mirror, leaving all 8 bays free for drives for future expansion needs, as a possibility. But if six data drives are enough then this becomes less interesting. An possible option though. I chucked 2 SSDs into one 5.25" slot for my boot mirror, which worked out nicely, and a cheaper option is to use 2.5" HDs instead -- with a twin mounter here: http://breden.org.uk/2009/08/29/home-fileserver-mirrored-ssd-zfs-root-boot/ > My current chassis has 8 hot-swap bays, so unless I > change that, nothing I > can do will consume more than two additional > controller ports. Seems like > a two-port card would be cheaper than an 8-port card > (although as you say > that 8-port card isn't that bad, around $150 last I > looked it up). > > But does anybody have a good 2-port card to recommend > that's significantly > cheaper? If there is none, then future flexibility > does start to look > interesting. Maybe others can recommend a 2 or 4 port card. When I looked mid-2009 I found some card but I didn't really feel like the hardware or possibly the driver was that robust, and I prefer not to lose my data or get more grey hairs/headaches... so I chose the 8-port known robust card/driver option :) And you just know that you'll need that extra port or two one day... > I could have had more space initially by using the 4 > disks in RAIDZ > instead of two mirror pairs. I decided not to > because that left me only > very bad expansion options -- replacing all 4 drives > at once and risking > other drives failing during resilver 4 times in a row > (and the removed > drive isn't much use in recovery in that scenario I > don't think). Whereas > with the mirror pairs I run much less risk of errors > during resilver > simply based on less time, two disks vs. four disks. > I actually started > ith just one mirror pair, and then added a second > mirror vdev to the pool > when the first one started to get full. I basically > settled on mirror > pairs as my building blocks for this fileserver. Indeed, mirrors have a lot of interesting properties. But if you're upgrading now, you might want to consider using 3 way mirrors instead of 2 as this gives extra protection. > Ooh, looks like there's lots of interesting detail > there, too. Yes, I documented most of my ZFS discoveries there so others can hopefully benefit from my headaches :) Cheers, Simon http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/ -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
