I guess it's all in what you want. At the end of the day, you have to weigh the pros and cons and decide what is right for you. To me, adding drives in mirrored or raidz groups is a small price to pay for the speed, ease of administration, and data integrity that zfs offers. Snapshots and clones allow you to do things in an entirely new way and make life much more interesting. To me, i'd rather put my money into cheap, large disks and ram than expensive raid controllers. I'd rather have a self healing filesystem than....any other filesystem that pops into my head. There ARE some limitations in how you set up your pool, but if you have a halfway decent plan you can make them work FOR you instead of against you. If you don't wait until your out of space to upgrade you can plan your upgrade much better. Currently my pool is made up of 3 raidz vdevs with 4 1tb drives each. When i first set the system up it wasn't with thee same vdev size but by making good backups and planning upgrades i've been able to cope..now i just add a new vdev when i get i feel i need the space...i'm currently planning my next upgrade...which is another 4 drive vdev and perhaps a 3 drive vdev and a spare....theres nothing that says i have to get it all at once...
I'm also considering upgrading my 1tb drives with 2 tb drives...or using 2 tb drives for the next vdev....i haven't completely decided yet but the point is if you make some kind of plan you can build your pool accordingly. If i was only able to add a couple drives at a time i think i'd go with mirrored groups. On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 5:33 PM, Trevor Pretty <trevor_pre...@eagle.co.nz>wrote: > > Lets not forget despite the fact us lunatic fringe use OpenSolaris on > anything we can get our hands on. Sun Microsystems use Solaris to run > mission critical environments and adding disk in "chunks" like you have to > do in ZFS to a commercial organisation is no big deal. The data is worth far > more to most organisations than the disks. To get the functionality Sun's > customers now have with ZFS for zero dollars (with the exception of > shrinking lets not go down that rat hole), they use to have to pay many many > dollars to Veritas. Or they pay lots of money to Network Appliance . > > For Sun's *paying *customers to quoute Thomas "the benefits of ZFS far > outweigh the limitations" > > Lets not forget: UFS/xVFS SVM/xVM and the whole RAID industry, have many > more years of development and use. ZFS is still the new kid on the block, he > might not be as good as some of the old boys in the playground, but he is > creating a stir and gowning up fast! > > > Thomas Burgess wrote: > > Why not just do simple mirrored vdevs? or use cheaper 1tb drives for the > second vdev? > I don't know....it's up to you...To me the benefits of ZFS far outweigh the > limitations. Also, in my opinion, when you are expanding your storage, it's > a good idea to add it in chunks like this...adding a 4 drive vdev is the way > *I* do it right now....though i use 1tb drives because the 2tb drives aren't > worth it atm. > > 1tb drives are around 80 bucks and 7200 rpm, 2tb drives are 250-300 and > 5400 rpm...for the cost of 2 2tb drives you could EASILY add vdevs of 1tb > drives... > > On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 7:03 AM, Chester <no-re...@opensolaris.org> wrote: > >> Thanks for the info so far. Yes, I understand that you can add more >> vdevs, but at what cost? With the 2TB drives costing $300 each, I wanted to >> get more or less the bare minimum and then add more drives once I filled the >> capacity. I understand that raidz1 is similar to RAID5 (it can recover from >> a single drive failure) and raidz2 is similar to RAID6 (recovery from up to >> two drive failures). Since I have four drives now, I would leave that with >> single parity and probably the next time I added a drive, I would migrate >> over to double parity. >> >> In your scenario, once I fill up my storage capacity, I would need to add >> another three drives; therefore dedicating two drives for parity (one for >> the four disk set and one for the three disk set), which would be similar to >> my plan of moving to double parity. However, what about after that? Three >> drives dedicated to single parity for three different sets? Certainly, I >> would get to a point where I wouldn't want 16 drives constantly spinning and >> I would hope by then either solid state disks have moved up in storage size >> and down in terms of price so I could start cutting over to those. >> >> Is there a way to expand the zpool to take advantage of the increased size >> of the hardware once I add a disk on the 3ware controller? I looked >> zfsadmin document and see an autoexpand property, but that feature doesn't >> appear to be support by OpenSolaris. >> -- >> This message posted from opensolaris.org >> _______________________________________________ >> zfs-discuss mailing list >> zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org >> http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss >> > > > > > > * > > * > > www.eagle.co.nz > > This email is confidential and may be legally privileged. If received in > error please destroy and immediately notify us. > > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss > >
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