I've been informed that newer versions of ZFS supports the usage of hot spares which is denoted for drives that are not in use but available for resynchronization/resilvering should one of the original drives fail in the assigned storage pool.
I'm a little sceptical about this because even the hot spare will be running for the same duration as the other disks in the pool and therefore will be exposed to the same levels of hardware degradation and failures unless it is put to sleep during the time it is not being used for storage. So, is there a sleep/hibernation/standby mode that the hot spares operate in or are they on all the time regardless of whether they are in use or not? Usually the hot spare is on a not so well-performing SAS/SATA controller, so given the scenario of a hard drive failure upon which a hot spare has been used for resilvering of say a raidz2 cluster, can I move the resilvered hot spare to the faster controller by letting it take the faulty hard drive's space using the "zpool offline", "zpool online" commands? To be more general; are the hard drives in the pool "hard coded" to their SAS/SATA channels or can I swap their connections arbitrarily if I would want to do that? Will zfs automatically identify the association of each drive of a given pool or tank and automatically reallocate them to put the pool/tank/filesystem back in place? -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
