[OpenIndiana-discuss] building a new box soon- HDD concerns and recommendations for virtual serving

[Jay Heyl]

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Carl Brewer <carl at bl.echidna.id.au> wrote:

>
> 2 x 2TB HDDs for rpool (ZFS mirror)
> 4 x 2TB HDD's to get at least a 4TB mirror (or is RAID-Z a better option?)
>
> Would I be better off with some 500GB HDD's for the rpool?  And while I
> fiddle with this thing, is there any way to get the live CD installer to
> work with these drives without poking around with some other OS to
> partition the drive?


In my rather limited experience, dedicating two 2TB drives to the rpool for
a home server is rather a waste. I have mirrored 500GB drives on mine and
they are a vast wasteland of unused capacity. In my opinion you could go
even smaller if you could put the money to better use.

The raid-z vs mirrors question can quickly get rather complicated. I'd say
if you think 4TB is going to hold you for a good long while, then go with
mirrors. If the six drives you're already talking about are going to
stretch the capacity of your case and you think you may need to expand
beyond 4TB in the reasonably near future, then you might want to consider
raid-z1 to get 6TB usable space from your data pool.

One thing I would recommend is trying to use the ashift=12 setting to force
the use of 4k blocks. I ran into problems because my initial pools were
created with 512-byte blocks. When I bought some spare drives I couldn't
use them because they were advanced format with 4k blocks and zfs won't mix
block sizes on the same vdev. Had I used 4k blocks when I initially set
everything up I wouldn't have had this problem with the new drives.