ZFS guidelines - preparing for future storage expansion

[Danny Carroll]

On 1/12/2009 6:33 AM, Zaphod Beeblebrox wrote:
> I moved from 5x 750G to 5x 1.5T disks this way earlier this year.  It takes
> a _long_ time.  resilvering 750g (they were about 98% full when I did this)
> onto the 1.5T disks took about 12 hours each.  With work and sleep and other
> distractions, it took most of a week to perform the upgrade.  And keep in
> mind that while you're upgrading, you're vulnerable to data loss (no more
> replicas). I suppose RAIDZ2 would make that safer, but more costly.
>    

Would it be possible to mitigate the risk of data loss by marking all 
ZFS volumes read only?   That way if you lose a disk, you could simply 
put back the old disk.
I have no idea if this is possible, I'd imagine ZFS may not be happy to 
see a drive again that it was told to replace.

Also, it might not be appropriate for most production systems, but if 
you can afford the inconvenience of not being able to write while the 
array is resilvering then it may be suitable for some.

Just a thought....

-D