Mike, I think you are missing the point. What we are talking about is removing a drive from a zpool, that is, reducing the zpool's total capacity by a drive. Say you have 4 drives of 100GB in size, configured in a striped mirror, capacity of 200GB usable. We're discussing the case where if the zpool's total used space is under 100GB, we could remove the second vdev (consisting of a mirror) from the zpool, and have ZFS evacuate all the data from the to-be-removed vdev before we actually remove the disks (or, maybe we simply want to reconfigure them into another zpool). In this case, after the drive remoovals, the zpool would be left with a 100GB capacity, and be a simple 2-drive mirror.
What you are talking about is replacement of a drive, whether or not it is actually bad. In your instance, the zpool capacity size remains the same, and it will return to optimal performance when a new drive is inserted (and, no, there is no difference between a manual and automatic "removal" in the case of marking a drive bad for replacement). -Erik On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 18:01 -0800, mike wrote: > what is the technical difference between forcing a removal and an > actual failure? > > isn't it the same process? except one is manually triggered? i would > assume the same resilvering process happens when a usable drive is put > back in... > > On 1/18/07, Wee Yeh Tan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Not quite. I suspect you are thinking about drive replacement rather > > than removal. > > > > Drive replacement is already supported in ZFS and the task involves > > rebuilding data on the disk from data available elsewhere. Drive > > removal involves rebalancing data from the target drive to other > > disks. The latter is non-trivial. > > > > > > -- > > Just me, > > Wire ... > > > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss -- Erik Trimble Java System Support Mailstop: usca14-102 Phone: x17195 Santa Clara, CA Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800) _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss