My current setup is 2x 1.5TB internal drives, mirrored. I store my 20 year image library (as primary) on here.
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zpool status
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
BigDiskZFS ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
media-768C27ED-1283-44FF-8F3D-A91A4DC8E6A4 ONLINE 0 0 0
media-98876398-784F-4E46-B1E2-7DFB1AB655A7 ONLINE 0 0 0
zpool version
zfs-1.9.0-1
zfs-kmod-1.9.0-1
I am considering going with a Mac Mini, and buying an external Thunderbolt enclosure, such as a 5 bay or 6 bay that supports JBOD. I just use my Mac for image editing and management (need graphics card for 2D accelerated image processing only), browsing web and email.
My plan is to:
- Have that enclosure have: a) my main ZFS storage drive for my images; b) potentially have one disk be HFS+ for time machine backup.
- 4-5 magnetic 3.5" disks for the main ZFS pool. I want a bit more protection than my current 2 disk setup offers. Not really sure what the benefits of the various RAID options are.
- A thunderbolt enclosure so that it is backwards compatible with the Mac Pro, and forwards compatible with the new Mac Mini when I get that.
- Ideally have an easy migration path whereby my ZFS pool name and contents are installed into the new set of disks on the enclosure. I want to do this so that my image libraries (e.g. Lightroom), and automation scripts all work without me needing to reconfigure anything.
- I'd like to setup the new ZFS pool with brand new disks, move the data from the original pool, and then make the new pool name = the old one.
- Migration to the new enclosure would be all done on the 2009 Mac Pro, then at the point in time that a new ARM based Mac Mini is available I will get that (assuming of course OpenZFS still works with whatever Apple does with that migration. That's another topic we shouldn't go into here)
I'm not sure if the above is possible, but thoughts appreciated, including good tips on a nice (high quality!) enclosure or other ways of making this not painful. If I have to end up with a new ZFS pool name, then so be it.
My understanding of ZFS is that it is somewhat limited for growing a pool of disks, so I don't think I can just stick my existing 2x disks in the enclosure and 'add drives' like one could do with Drobo, Unraid, Synology etc. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
I am considering FreeNAS also, but don't think that would run very fast for direct storage.