I have a new array of 4x1.5TB drives running fine. I also have the old array of 4x400GB drives in the box on a separate pool for testing. I was planning to have the old drives just be a backup file store, so I could keep snapshots and such over there for important files. I was wondering if it makes any sense to add the older drives to the new pool. Reliability might be lower as they are older drives, so if I were to loose 2 of them, things could get ugly. I''m just curious if it would make any sense to do something like this. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
Hmm.. I expected people to jump on me yelling that it''s a bad idea. :) How about this, can I remove a vdev from a pool if the pool still has enough space to hold the data? So could I add it in and mess with it for a while without losing anything? I would expect the system to resliver the data onto the remaining vdevs, or tell me to go jump off a pier. :) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Travis Tabbal <travis at tabbal.net> wrote:> Hmm.. I expected people to jump on me yelling that it''s a bad idea. :) > > How about this, can I remove a vdev from a pool if the pool still has > enough space to hold the data? So could I add it in and mess with it for a > while without losing anything? I would expect the system to resliver the > data onto the remaining vdevs, or tell me to go jump off a pier. :) > -- >Jump off a pier. Removing devices is not currently supported but it is in the works. --Tim -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20091023/369ef268/attachment.html>
You could add these new drives to your zpool. Then you should create a new vdev as a raidz1 or raidz2 vdev, and then add them to your zpool. I suggest raidz2, becuase that gives you greater reliability. However, you can not remove a vdev. In the future, say that you have swapped your original drives to 4TB, then those small drives will only be a nuisance (unless you swap them to larger drives too). And you can not remove these small drives, you can not remove a vdev. They will only suck power and make noice. Therefore, I myself, would not have added them to your zpool. Instead I would have created another zpool2 of these small drives. That zpool2 you can destroy later if you wish. I am building a zpool with 8 of 1TB drives. In the future, I will just swap them to 2TB or 4TB drives, when I need more capacity. Instead of adding lots and lots of small drives. They will only give med headache later when 4TB drives are common. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
On 23/10/2009, at 9:39 AM, Travis Tabbal wrote:> I have a new array of 4x1.5TB drives running fine. I also have the > old array of 4x400GB drives in the box on a separate pool for > testing. I was planning to have the old drives just be a backup file > store, so I could keep snapshots and such over there for important > files. > > I was wondering if it makes any sense to add the older drives to the > new pool. Reliability might be lower as they are older drives, so if > I were to loose 2 of them, things could get ugly. I''m just curious > if it would make any sense to do something like this.Makes sense to me. My current upgrade strategy is to add groups of 5 disks whenever space is needed, up until physical space is exhausted, each time getting the current best $/GB disks. This will result, at times, in having significant amounts of data on relatively few disks though, impacting performance.