ZFS Question

[David Rawling]

  On 16/08/2010 8:56 AM, Depo Catcher wrote:
> Hi, I'm building a new file server.  Right now I'm on FreeBSD 6.4/UFS2 and 
> going to go to 8.1 with ZFS.
>
> Right now I have 3 disks, but one of them has data on it.  I'd like to setup 
> a RaidZ but have a question on how to do this:
> Basically, I need to setup a mirror with the two empty drives, copy the data 
> over and then add the third.  Is that even possible?
That kind of expansion cannot be done with FreeBSD ZFS (yet - I believe it was 
being worked on in OpenSolaris and it would have filtered to FreeBSD). Once 
the pool uses a given RAID level, I believe that's set in stone.

What might work is this - paraphrased because I'm not 100% sure of the 
specific commands:

* Create a large (multiple GB) file on your existing disk - let's assume 
that's /disk1/file0 (dd if=/dev/zero of=/disk1/file0 bs=1024 count=104857600 
would be 100GB)
* Create a 3 disk RAIDZ1 pool using /dev/disk2, /dev/disk3 and /disk1/file0 
(zpool create tank raidz1 ...)
* Delete the file (the pool will be degraded)
* Copy data to the degraded pool
* Replace the missing disk file with /dev/disk1 (zpool replace?)
* Scrub the pool for consistency checks (then reset the counters so you can 
track the current state.

You'll want a backup just in case, though, so is there perhaps a case for 
getting 1 more disk and building the set clean? That way the old disk becomes 
a backup.

Dave.

-- 
David Rawling
PD Consulting And Security
Mob: +61 412 135 513
Email: djr at pdconsec.net