ZfS & GEOM with many odd drive sizes

[Mark Powell]

On Wed, 25 Jul 2007, Doug Rabson wrote:

> I'm not really sure why you are using gmirror, gconcat or gstripe at
> all. Surely it would be easier to let ZFS manage the mirroring and
> concatentation. If you do that, ZFS can use its checksums to continually
> monitor the two sides of your mirrors for consistency and will be able
> to notice as early as possible when one of the drives goes flakey. For
> concats, ZFS will also spread redundant copies of metadata (and regular
> data if you use 'zfs set copies=<N>') across the disks in the compat. If
> you have to replace one half of a mirror, ZFS has enough information to
> know exactly which blocks needs to be copied to the new drive which can
> make recovery much quicker.

gmirror is only going to used for the ufs /boot parition and block device 
swap. (I'll ignore the smallish space used by that below.)
   I thought gstripe was a solution cos I mentioned in the original post 
that I have the following drives to play with; 1x400GB, 3x250GB, 3x200GB.
   If I make a straight zpool with all those drives I get a total usable 
7x200GB raidz with only an effective 6x200GB=1200GB of usable storage. 
Also a 7 device raidz cries out for being a raidz2? That's a further 200GB 
of storage lost.
   My original plan was (because of the largest drive being a single 400GB) 
was to gconcat (now to gstripe) the smaller drives into 3 pairs of 
250GB+200GB, making three new 450GB devices. This would make a zpool of 4 
devices i.e. 1x400GB+3x450GB giving effective storage of 1200GB. Yes, it's 
the same as above (as long as raidz2 is not used there), but I was 
thinking about future expansion...
   The advantge this approach seems to give is that when drives fail each 
device (which is either a single drive or a gstripe pair) can be replaced 
with a modern larger drive (500GB or 750GB depending on what's economical 
at the time).
   Once that replacement has been performed only 4 times, the zpool will 
increase in size (actually it will increase straight away by 4x50GB total 
if the 400GB drive fails 1st).
   In addition, once a couple of drives in a pair have failed and are 
replaced by a single large drive, there will also be smaller 250GB or 
200GB drives spare which can be further added to the zpool as a zfs 
mirror.
   The alternative of using a zpool of 7 individual drives means that I 
need to replace many more drives to actually see an increase in zpool 
size.
   Yes, there a large number of combinations here, but it seems that the 
zpool will increase in size sooner this way?
   I believe my reasoning is correct here? Let me know if your experience 
would suggest otherwise.
   Many thanks.

-- 
Mark Powell - UNIX System Administrator - The University of Salford
Information Services Division, Clifford Whitworth Building,
Salford University, Manchester, M5 4WT, UK.
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