On Wed, June 2, 2010 17:54, Roman Naumenko wrote: > Recently I talked to a co-worker who manages NetApp storages. We discussed > size changes for pools in zfs and aggregates in NetApp. > > And some time before I had suggested to a my buddy zfs for his new home > storage server, but he turned it down since there is no expansion > available for a pool.
I set up my home fileserver with ZFS (in 2006) BECAUSE zfs could expand the pool for me, and nothing else I had access to could do that (home fileserver, little budget). My server is currently running with one data pool, three vdevs. Each of the data vdev is a two-way mirror. I started with one, expanded to two, then expanded to three. Rather than expanding to four when this fills up, I'm going to attach a larger drive to the first mirror vdev, and then a second one, and then remove the two current drives, thus expanding the vdev without ever compromising the redundancy. My choice of mirrors rather than RAIDZ is based on the fact that I have only 8 hot-swap bays (I still think of this as LARGE for a home server; the competition, things like the Drobo, tends to have 4 or 5), that I don't need really large amounts of storage (after my latest upgrade I'm running with 1.2TB of available data space), and that I expected to need to expand storage over the life of the system. With mirror vdevs, I can expand them without compromising redundancy even temporarily, by attaching the new drives before I detach the old drives; I couldn't do that with RAIDZ. Also, the fact that disk is now so cheap means that 100% redundancy is affordable, I don't have to compromise on RAIDZ. -- David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
