Hello. I've got a home-storage-server setup with Opensolaris (currently dev build 134) that is quickly running out of storage space, and I'm looking through what kind of options I have for expanding it.
I currently have my "storage-pool" in a 4x 1TB drive setup in RAIDZ1, and have room for 8-9 more drives in the case/controllers. Preferably I'd like to change it all to a RAIDZ2 with 12 drives, and 1 hotspare, but that would require me to transfer out all the data to an external storage, and then recreating a new pool, which would require me buying some additional external storage that will not be used after I'm done with the transfer. I could also add 2 more 4 drive vdevs to the current pool, but then I would have 3 RAIDZ1 vdevs striped, and I'm not entirely sure that I'm comfortable with that level of protection on the data. Another version would be creating a 6 drive RAIDZ2 pool, moving the data to that one and the destroying the old pool and adding another 6 drive vdev to the new pool (striped). So the question is what would you recommend for growing my storage space: 1. Buying extra hardware to copy the data to, and rebuild the pool as a 12 drive RAIDZ2. 2. Move data to a 6 drive RAIDZ2 and then destroy the old pool and stripe an additional RAIDZ2 vdevs. 3. Stripe 2 additional RAIDZ1 4 drive vdevs. 4. Something else. Easiest would of course be adding new 4-drive vdevs to the existing pool, but I'm unsure how much I'd be able to trust more than 1 drive not failing in that setup. Am I worried needlessly? (Imagine 10% or so of the data as vacation-footage or something like that and you'll be rather close to how I value the data. I have some backups of the most important stuff, but I know myself good enough to know I will not backup everything I should as good as I should). I guess a hotspare on top of the stripe would give some extra buffer if the drives just resilver fast enough in case of a failure, so that would make it a bit more "safe". The hardware setup if anyone's interested is opensolaris running in a VM on an ESXi-server, and storage-pool harddrives are place in a iSCSI target that I connect to using ESXi's iSCSI initiator (using MPIO) and attached to the VM as RAW-devices. Hope someone has some ideas or opinions. Regards Andreas Gunnarsson -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
