Hi whitetr6, An interesting situation to which there is no, "right," answer. In fact, many different answers depending on where you put your priorities.
I'm with Frank in keeping data and OS separate. As you've only got two drives, I'd put between 30 to 40 gig as an OS pool on each drive (making each individually bootable - I was helped out with the method on this thread - http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=454491) and then the remainder of the drives as data. So you've sort of got... Drive 1 - <-30gig OS-> <-720gig data-> Drive 2 - <-30gig OS-> <-720gig data-> ...completely mirrored and independently bootable. Open Solaris creates its boot partition as a Zpool anyway, so it is relatively straightforward to mirror it. I made a short video of the advice that I was given, here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpzsSptzmyA - and that technique will also cover you for installing on drives of different sizes, so if you upgrade the hard drives later, this technique will hold solid and also enable you to add another drive should you have to replace one. You might have to adjust that advice if you're not using your entire drive for the system partition. The only thing I've ever seen take out both internal drives at the same time is a power surge by either external sources, or an overheated PSU blowing in the PC. Surge protection and adequate cooling should minimise the risks. I'm assuming you've got a routine to take snapshots and get them off the box; based on what you've already written. Having an OS booting from USB is possible; from what I've seen of ZFS so far, I believe it would be possible to attach two USB keys and have them mirrored and bootable also! But personally I don't see any real need to do it this way. So, if I were in your shoes, I'd partition as per above and run the two hard disks ... but have an external drive available for backup. It would be worth practising the technique of mirroring the root partition, handling zpools and recovering from failures before committing data to it. The practice is well worth it IMHO. I hope this helps. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
