Comments on: Create future proof ZFS pools

By: Will

Will — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 23:47:42 +0000

I’m using a degraded array as a temporary measure whilst I juggle HDD’s / money. Buying 4HDD’s all in one go is expensive, so I was spreading it out whilst I sorted out the systems the data is coming from. Its certainly not a long-term solution 🙂
My expectation is that whilst the array is degraded I can still lose 1 disk without loosing everything, and then once I have a 4th disk available I can repair the degraded array and have 2 disks worth of redundancy.

All that being said, if it went belly-up, it would be irritating and cost me time. But it shouldn’t cost me all my data. I still have the source disks with the data on them.

By: Niobos

Niobos — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 07:15:52 +0000

I’ve read your thread, but since “cyberjock” doesn’t give any info on what might be wrong, I can’t give an answer either.
As linked in my post, doing ZFS on full disks is the recommended way. And I don’t see anything wrong with taking the intermediate step with files to make the array “shrinkable”.
I do agree that creating a degraded array is somewhat strange. What are you trying to accomplish with that?

By: Will

Will — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 06:58:10 +0000

Hi, I used your guide as a basis for some FreeNAS work I was doing so my reason for posting is two-fold.
Firstly, thanks for your guide. I’ve attributed your post but thought you might like to know it helped someone 🙂
Secondly, a moderator mentioned he has seen some problems with what I was doing and I wondered if you had heard anything similar. My searching/forum-ing has come up blank.

This is the post btw: http://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/creating-a-degraded-raidz-via-sparse-files.18276/