[i]I think the original poster, was thinking that non-enterprise users would be most interested in only having to *purchase* one drive at a time.
Enterprise users aren't likely to balk at purchasing 6-10 drives at a time, so for them adding an additional *new* RaidZ to stripe across is easier. [/i] Yes. I have $xxx to spend on disks and can afford 3. As my needs increase, I'll have saved enough to buy another disk. Traditionally, you RAID your disks together then use a VM to divvy it up into partitions that can grow/shrink as needed. The total size of the RAID isn't important until you've filled it. Then you want to increase the RAID. You could just add new RAID chunks and have a VM on each chunk. But you'd be wasting some of your space. The incremental cost of the added space is the same as the original RAID. 3*n*R5=2n 4*n*R5=3n. Or doubling the disks: 6*n*R5=5n vs 3*n*R5 + 3*n*R5 = 2n + 2n = 4n (6 disks) or 3*n*R5 + 4*n*R5 = 2n + 3n = 5n (7 disks) The cost of scaling/loss of space is balanced against the cost of backup/wipe&reraid/restore. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
