Maybe this has been discussed before, but I haven't been able to find any relevant threads.
I have a simple OpenSolaris 2008.11 setup with one ZFS pool consisting of the whole of the single hard drive on the system. What I want to do is to replace the present 500 GB drive with a 1.5 TB drive. (The latter costs what the former cost a year ago. :-) Once the replacement is complete, I will install a second 1.5 TB drive to mirror the first one. The smaller drive will go into my legacy Linux box.) The way I hope I can do this is by first using the larger drive to mirror the smaller one. Once the silvering is complete, I would remove the smaller drive. My question is: once the smaller drive has been removed, will the zpool use all of the larger, replacement drive? The ZFS Administration Guide does not appear to give an answer to this. The only thing I could find in the December 2008 version is the following about "Replacing Devices in a Storage Pool" on p. 115: "If the replacement device is larger, the pool capacity is increased when the replacement is complete." But "zpool replace" does not seem relevant to what I want to do, since I don't see how you can use the procedure described there to replace a drive which comprises the root zpool, which is what I want to do. The only thing I have been able to find about this anywhere is the following from the Wikipedia article on ZFS: "Capacity expansion is normally achieved by adding groups of disks as a vdev (stripe, RAID-Z, RAID-Z2, or mirrored). Newly written data will dynamically start to use all available vdevs. It is also possible to expand the array by iteratively swapping each drive in the array with a bigger drive and waiting for ZFS to heal itself — the heal time will depend on amount of stored information, not the disk size. The new free space will not be available until all the disks have been swapped." Is this correct? -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
