On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 7:03 AM, Harry Putnam <rea...@newsguy.com> wrote: > Apparently you are not disagreeing with Daniel Cs' comment above so I > guess you are talking about disk partitions here?
I'm not disagreeing, but the use case for a server is different than for a laptop that can only hold one drive. > Currently two 500gb IDE drives make up rpool. So to have mirror > redundancy of rpool, do you mean to create identical partitions on > each disk for mirrored rpool, then use the other partition for data? Er, not exactly. There are a few constraints on rpools and on zpools that limit what you can do for the rpool. The first constraint is that it only supports one top-level vdev, and that vdev can only be non-redundant or a mirror. If the pool fills up, you can't grow it by adding more disks. This limits your future growth. You could replace the drives with larger ones, but that's about it. Once it fills up, you have to start deleting. By default the write cache is disabled when zfs doesn't have access to the whole disk, and due to the way BIOS boots, the boot drive is partitioned. The rpool will have slightly worse performance as a result. Partitioning out a smaller boot volume and using the rest in a second zpool will just wind up with the second pool having poor performance too. You could add more vdevs to the second pool (or add them one that already exists) but performance will also be unbalanced since the partitions will be slower. It's not a pretty picture. It'll work, it just won't offer the performance that you probably want. > I thought I remembered being told it was better not to partition disks > but I'm probably just confused about it. You're right, it's best not to. If you want to keep your rpool separate, dedicate a drive (or two) as the boot drives and leave it at that. Move any user data to your larger (and better performing) pools and call it a day. -B -- Brandon High : bh...@freaks.com _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
