On Sat, 28 Mar 2009, Michael Shadle wrote:
Well this is for a home storage array for my dvds and such. If I have to turn it off to swap a failed disk it's fine. It does not need to be highly available and I do not need extreme performance like a database for example. 45mb/sec would even be acceptable.
I can see that 14 disks costs a lot for a home storage array but to you the data on your home storage array may be just as important as data on some businesses enterprise storage array. In fact, it may be even more critical since it seems unlikely that you will have an effective backup system in place like large businesses do.
The main problem with raidz1 is that if a disk fails and you replace it, that if a second disk substantially fails during resilvering (which needs to successfully read all data on remaining disks) then your ZFS pool (or at least part of the files) may be toast. The more data which must be read during resilvering, the higher the probability that there will be a failure. If 12TB of data needs to be read to resilver a 1TB disk, then that is a lot of successful reading which needs to go on.
In order to lessen risk, you can schedule a periodic zfs scrub via a cron job so that there is less probabily of encountering data which can not be read. This will not save you from entirely failed disk drives though.
As far as Tim's post that NOBODY recommends using better than RAID5, I hardly consider companies like IBM and NetApp to be "NOBODY". Only Sun RAID hardware seems to lack RAID6, but Sun offers ZFS's raidz2 so it does not matter.
Bob -- Bob Friesenhahn bfrie...@simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/ GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/ _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
