Hello everybody,
If you are just interested in the short version, please scroll down to the ***
I’m new here and generally new to this entire style of computing. I have been a Mac user for more than 30 years now, but until recently have never had any need or inclination to touch things like the command line. I have been focused on things like music creation and teaching.
I’ve decided to start upping my skills and look into doing some computer retraining. I love learning and would be extremely appreciative of any assistance the users of this forum could provide, however it can be generally assumed I don’t know any lingo or acronyms. I have done 0 computer schooling.
At the shop where I work, a customer abandoned a 5,1 MacPro with a dead graphics card and I decided to rebuild it using some pieces I had and some more I ordered. It’s not top-of-the line, but it should be more than adequate for my needs.
I could go into complete build details if needed, but I suspect that would be irrelevant at best and boring at worst.
I had 4x4TB drives that I wanted to pop in the 4 drive bays for bulk storage (boot ssd and dedicated time machine backup are on a pcie card) configured in a RAID. I got a good deal on a 12TB drive (in an unused optical bay) for the RAID to back up to. RAID5 seemed to be the way to go for space vs redundancy and I have the backup drive for extra safety (via Carbon Copy Cloner) in case the whole thing went down. But as I’m sure you know, MacOS doesn’t support RAID5.
I obviously needed a different solution and down the rabbit hole I went until I discovered ZFS. It took work, way more work than I’m used to and I had to hack together bits of knowledge in a way that I’m not yet comfortable with, however, I did it.
I was able to download & install OpenZFS and create a RAIDZ pool with my drives. I was extremely proud of myself, because even though I knew what I was doing was very basic, it took a lot of effort to figure it out. So here’s the first issue I’m facing:
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Although I was successful...
1. I have no idea what I did
2. I couldn’t replicate it
Is there a way to get some sort of readout of exactly what I did? I hope it will be a good starting point for future discussions.
Thanks in advance
Ed