Newbie advice! Best zpool setup? HFS + ZFS on same drive?

Moderators: jhartley, MSR734, nola

Newbie advice! Best zpool setup? HFS + ZFS on same drive?

Post by melchior » Fri Jan 18, 2013 7:52 am

Hi,

I'm on a mac pro and have approximately 4.1TB of data, but I suppose we should round that up to 4.5TB.

I have 5 working SATA ports.

At the moment I have 4 x 2TB drives and 1 x 1.5TB (9.5TB total...) where all data is duplicated using rsync. These are all separate volumes.

The 1.5TB drives is however failing, apparently. It is showing I/O errors in the console.

I am thinking I will get a 3TB seagate drive to replace it.

I cannot however figure out how I would configure my zfs pool without buying two 3TB drives.

The only way I could do it is if I have my startup volume as HFS+ of 500GB and then the remaining 1.5TB added to a pool along with two 2TB drives and have a second pool with the 3TB plus a 2TB drive.

Is this possible? Is this a bad idea?

How does it compare to the bad idea of creating a RAID array of the 4 x 2TB disks without having capacity for a full backup? I'd have a parity disk and I'd prioritise backing up the most important data to the 3TB disk.

Or, I could just make all my disks individual zfs volumes and continue my backup system as is with the added security blanket of zfs.

Thanks for your help!
melchior Offline


 
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2013 6:45 am

Orientation

Post by grahamperrin » Fri Jan 18, 2013 5:39 pm

This forum is for questions and comments about the ZEVO CE installation process only.

Questions such as this should be under general discussion. I have flagged this topic to be moved.

Also please see latency: avoid mixing HFS Plus and ZFS on a single hard disk
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Re: Newbie advice! Best zpool setup? HFS + ZFS on same drive

Post by melchior » Fri Jan 18, 2013 7:04 pm

My apologies. I interpreted installation to include configuration choices. Maybe a newbie forum is order, to avoid clogging the general forum.

Thanks for the link on not mixing ZFS and HFS+.

I have been thinking about this overnight and I really don't see any workable solution for my data size without buying a bunch of new drives except to essentially continue with my current configuration... Hoping I've missed some magic configuration solution.
melchior Offline


 
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2013 6:45 am

Thoughts

Post by grahamperrin » Sat Jan 19, 2013 8:03 am

If an online backup service is acceptable, then low cost options include Arq and Backblaze.

Need Help with a Backup Solution

Your four 2 TB drives in RAID-Z would yield around 5.5 TB usable. Subtract 4.1 to leave around 1.4 TB free.

Aim to never significantly cross the threshold of twenty percent free.

To replace the 1.5 TB drive, maybe spend on two devices:

  • internally, a relatively low cost hybrid drive, not massive – large enough to be an HFS Plus startup volume for OS X
  • externally, a solid state drive for L2ARC, as large as you can afford (I have no idea about cost).

How much memory in the Mac?
grahamperrin Offline

User avatar
 
Posts: 1596
Joined: Fri Sep 14, 2012 10:21 pm
Location: Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Re: Newbie advice! Best zpool setup? HFS + ZFS on same drive

Post by melchior » Sat Jan 19, 2013 9:39 am

Online backup would be perfect, except that this computer is in Australia and maximum upload is around 150KB/s.

Also, I spend most months of the year overseas and it is turned off during this time. At this stage, I don't think a L2ARC drive is necessary.

I would probably feel relatively secure with raidz2, but of course I would need 5 x 2TB drives to satisfy my needs, leaving me without a boot drive...
melchior Offline


 
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Jan 18, 2013 6:45 am


Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: ilovezfs and 1 guest

cron