[EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > Richard Elling wrote: >> For the time being, these SATA disks will operate in IDE compatibility mode, >> so don't worry about the write cache. There is some debate about whether >> the write cache is a win at all, but that is another rat hole. Go ahead >> and split off some space for boot and swap. Put the rest in ZFS. Mirror >> for best all-around performance. > > I assume you mean to dedicate one drive to boot/swap/upgrade, and the other > three drives to ZFS. But I can't mirror with only 3 drives, so I think RAIDZ > is best, wouldn't you agree?
I'll chime in here with a "me too" to Richard's suggestion, though slightly different layout. We have a Sun T2000 here with 4x 73GB drives, and it works just fine to mix UFS and ZFS on old-fashioned slices (partitions) across all four of them. On your first disk, use s0 for a large-enough root, maybe 10GB; Then s1 is swap; The rest of the disk can be s6, which you'll use for ZFS. Now, slice up all four disks exactly the same way. Create an SVM mirror across the first two s0's, that's your root. Create a 2nd SVM mirror across the first two s1's, that's your swap. The 3rd and 4th s0's and s1's can be anything you like, maybe mirrored alternate boot env. for liveupgrade, etc. I made mine into a ZFS-mirrored /export. Lastly, use the four s6's to create a "big" RAID-Z pool. With your four 500GB drives, you've given up only 12-14GB each for your system usage, so the remaining 486-488GB should give you nearly 1.4TB of useable RAID-Z protected space. Sure, it's not "optimal", but it's really quite good. Regards, Marion _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
