Hi. I'm looking for the best solution to create an expandable heterogeneous pool of drives. I think in an ideal world, there'd be a raid version which could cleverly handle both multiple drive sizes and the addition of new drives into a group (so one could drop in a new drive of arbitrary size, maintain some redundancy, and gain most of that drive's capacity), but my impression is that we're far from there.
Absent that, I was considering using zfs and just having a single pool. My main question is this: what is the failure mode of zfs if one of those drives either fails completely or has errors? Do I permanently lose access to the entire pool? Can I attempt to read other data? Can I "zfs replace" the bad drive and get some level of data recovery? Otherwise, by pooling drives am I simply increasing the probability of a catastrophic data loss? I apologize if this is addressed elsewhere -- I've read a bunch about zfs, but not come across this particular answer. As a side-question, does anyone have a suggestion for an intelligent way to approach this goal? This is not mission-critical data, but I'd prefer not to make data loss _more_ probable. Perhaps some volume manager (like LVM on linux) has appropriate features? Thanks for any help. -puk This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
