I have a small stack of disks that I was considering putting in a box to build a backup server. It would only store data that is duplicated elsewhere, so I wouldn''t really need redundancy at the disk layer. The biggest issue is that the disks are not all the same size. So I can''t really do a raidz or mirror with them anyway. So I was considering just putting them all in one pool. My question is how does zpool behave if I lose one disk in this pool? Can I still access the data on the other disks? Or is it like a traditional raid0 and I lose the whole pool? Is there a better way to deal with this, using my old mismatched hardware? Yes, I could probably build a raidz by partitioning and such, but I''d like to avoid the complexity. I''d probably just use zfs send/recv to send snapshots over or perhaps crashplan. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org
no, if you don''t use redundancy, each disk you add makes the pool that much more likely to fair. This is the entire point of raidz . ZFS stripes data across all vdevs. On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:32 PM, Travis Tabbal <travis at tabbal.net> wrote:> I have a small stack of disks that I was considering putting in a box to > build a backup server. It would only store data that is duplicated > elsewhere, so I wouldn''t really need redundancy at the disk layer. The > biggest issue is that the disks are not all the same size. So I can''t really > do a raidz or mirror with them anyway. So I was considering just putting > them all in one pool. My question is how does zpool behave if I lose one > disk in this pool? Can I still access the data on the other disks? Or is it > like a traditional raid0 and I lose the whole pool? Is there a better way to > deal with this, using my old mismatched hardware? > > Yes, I could probably build a raidz by partitioning and such, but I''d like > to avoid the complexity. I''d probably just use zfs send/recv to send > snapshots over or perhaps crashplan. > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss >-------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/attachments/20100304/5310d567/attachment.html>
Thanks. That''s what I expected the case to be. Any reasons this shouldn''t work for strictly backup purposes? Obviously, one disk down kills the pool, but as I only ever need to care if I''m restoring, that doesn''t seem to be such a big deal. It will be a secondary backup destination for local machines like laptops that don''t have redundant storage. The primary backups will still be hosted on the main server with 2 raidz2 arrays. The only downside I can see to this idea is that I was expecting it to be used as an offsite backup as well, so in a real disaster I might have only a single non-redundant copy of the data. That alone might be enough reason for me not to do it. After getting used to redundancy, it''s hard to go back to not having it. :) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org