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

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 17 Apr 2013, Jay Heyl wrote:

> 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 drives take the same physical amount of space.  No harm done.

Unless the drives are high end enterprise drives, purchasing 500GB 
drives is a sure way to get outdated hardware which may have sat on 
the shelf for a long time.

I made the mistake of thinking that 500GB was better for the boot 
drives and both drives were replaced within 4 months with failures. 
The drives were replaced with 1TB drives and no more problems.

If the unused space is a problem, then just put junk data there that 
you don't need to backup and don't care to lose.

Bob
-- 
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen at simple.dallas.tx.us, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/