zfs drive configurations?

[Darren Reed]

Josef Karthauser wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 08, 2007 at 06:17:24PM -0700, Bakul Shah wrote:
>   
>>> What if I have 5 200gb drives configured as a raidz pool, and then I
>>> replace one of the 200gb drives with a 400gb one.  Operationally what
>>> would I do?
>>>       
>> I believe you can do something like
>>
>>     zpool replace <pool> <device>
>>
>> The new device will get "resilvered" -- get all the missing
>> data put on it and then brought up for operation.  This can
>> take a while.
>>
>> Note that you will not be able to use the extra disk until
>> *all* the disks in a group (mirror or raid) have been
>> replaced with bigger disks.
>>     
>
> Does it make sense to partition my disks into some nominal smaller
> chunks: D1a-g, D2a-g, ... D5a-g and run a number of raidz across the
> drives in parallel, D1a D2a .. D5a, etc?
>   

No.  ZFS's design assumes that what it sees in terms of performance and
operational
characteristics are for a complete drive, so if you split up a drive
into partitions and
merge part A and part B into ZFS, it will schedule work for them as if
they are
different drives.

Darren