Multiple Drives

[vinnan rangarajan]

can you please help me know if i can have multiple different size HDDs ranging from min of 750 GB - 4TB
I have the following drives to be exact
1=750 GB
1=1 TB
1=1.5 tb
1=2.0tb
1=3tb
1=4tb
Can i use raid 1 or atleast raid 0 without loosing space ?

 

[cyberjock]

Not effectively. ZFS is just like a hardware RAID when it comes to drive sizes. If they aren't the same you will "lose" some space. You should consider buying more of 1 particular size. If you don't need alot of space right now you could put them all in a RAIDZ2, and you'd be limited to just 3TB of space. But when you want more space you can buy a 4TB drive and replace the 750GB with a 4TB. That would add 1TB to your zpool. As you upgrade each disk you'll have more and more disk space available.

 

[vinnan rangarajan]

hmmm that wont work for now then :( for me ill just use them as regular drives thanks for the response

 

[cheezehead]

Hrm, what about running multiple mirrored vdev's and then striping them together? Would offer up 5.25TB usable.

 

[cyberjock]

You could do that, but you'd literally be paying more than 2x the $ per GB of storage. Mirrors aren't necessarily trustworthy either. RAID5 is "dead" for the same reasons mirrors can be bad. You only have 1 copy of your data in the event of a disk failure.