Comment on Need help with adding drives to a ZFS pool
3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 5 days ago
If you add 2 more drives surely it would be better to use raidz1? I mean you’d add capacity AND get parity protection so if any 1 drive failed the data would still be safe. 4x4TB drives with raidz1 would give you around 14.5 TB of storage with added security
SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org 5 days ago
I don’t think it’ll be ideal. Converting the mirror to z1 would be a big hassle. I don’t see any migration path where I can safely lose a disk without losing data. Also, if both of the old drives fail, I lose everything.
In any case, I’m perfectly happy with 8TB for now. It’s a doubling of my current capacity, of which I’m only using around 70%. I’ll be fine for quite a few years.
(Also, won’t it be around 12 TB, and not 14.5 TB?)
3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 5 days ago
Not if you use raidz1, if you use raidz2 then yes. raidz in zfs is pretty decent. I have had a disk fail in raidz1 and replaced it with another and no data was lost after a resilver. Took a few hours but worked really well. Pretty much the whole idea of using zfs is the enhanced security of your data, seems strange to not put that to good use. The chances of BOTH drives failing before you can replace 1 are very very slim. I get that there is no easy way to just migrate to raidz1 but you could if you got 3 drives, make a new raidz1 pool, copy the data across and then add the old 2 drives to to the pool with a new vdev. You need to be able to add 5 drives to the system though. Of course there are many options here, but you already know that
shiftymccool@programming.dev 5 days ago
Obligatory “RAID is not backup” PSA statement
3dcadmin@lemmy.relayeasy.com 5 days ago
of course, but each to their own and all that. I just feel that parity on data is pretty much a free help to keep data secure. Not a magic bullet but a helping hand. And zfs does it very very well!