# Server HD Configuration



## SuperMiguel (Jun 1, 2009)

I have 5 HDs. 1x80GB, 3x500GB and 1x1.5TB. Im setting up a home server, dont really need alot of speed or alot of redundancy since its just personal stuff. I Have about 600GB of info, i dont think ill grow up alot more than that. So should i install the OS on the 80GB,raid z the 3 500 and back up on the 1.5tb??

Any better idea?


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## SuperMiguel (Jun 1, 2009)

or i can create a pool stripping all 3 500gb drives, create another pool for the 1.5tb drive, and another pool to mirror both of these pools?


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## phoenix (Jun 2, 2009)

Don't do plain striping, as there is no redundancy involved.  IOW, if one drive dies, *ALL* the data in the stripeset, across all the drives, is gone.

How many drive bays do you have?  How big is the power supply?  Do you have any USB flash drives?

Until booting off a ZFS pool is reliable and safe, I'd recomend putting / and /usr onto a UFS filesystem.  Then put all your other filesystems (/home, /var, /tmp, /usr/local, /usr/src, /usr/obj, /usr/ports) onto ZFS filesystems.

If you have a pair of USB flash sticks, you can install onto one, and create a gmirror RAID1 array across the two of them.  If not, use the 80 GB drive as the OS/swap drive.  There are a couple of different how-tos out there for creating gmirror setups.

Use the 3x 500 GB drives to create a raidz1 vdev.  Add that to the pool.  That will give you 1 TB of drive space.

Then you can use the 1.5 TB drive for backups.

Or, you are really feeling wild  you can add the 1.5 TB drive to the pool to create a mirror for the raidz1 vdev.  

`# zpool create pool raidz1 disk1 disk2 disk3`
`# zpool attach pool disk4`
`# zpool status`


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## SuperMiguel (Jun 2, 2009)

so i can actually create a pool for disk1, disk2, and disk3. Then create another pool for disk4 (1.5TB). Then create another pool to mirror pool1 with pool2?


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## SuperMiguel (Jun 2, 2009)

or i guess i could install the os on the 80gb, raidz the 3x500gb and then using zfs send | receive backup my data to the 1.5tb drive


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## phoenix (Jun 2, 2009)

1 pool.

1 vdev comprised of the 3 500 GB drive in raidz (zpool create pool raidz1 disk0 disk1 disk2)

1 vdev comprised of the 1.5 TB drive (zpool attach pool disk4)

The beauty of a pooled storage is that you really only need 1 pool per system.


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## SuperMiguel (Jun 3, 2009)

whats the point of creating a single pool?


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## phoenix (Jun 3, 2009)

Depending on what you want to accomplish, you only need 1 storage pool per system.  You then create filesystems from that pool, as needed.

You really don't want to create 1 pool per disk.  That's just wasteful (IMO), and doesn't give you any real benefits over the old way of disk partitioning (you're still using/seeing individual disks).


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## SuperMiguel (Jun 3, 2009)

well well i really want to do is to raidz my 3x500gb drive and then do a backup of this raidz on the 1.5tb.. So what i was thinking is

# zpool create tank raiz drive1 drive2 drive3
# zfs create tank/main
copy all the data (700GB) to tank/main
create a snapshot
#zfs snapshot tank/main@1
# zpool create backup drive4
then copy that snapshot to my 1.5tb pool
# zfs send tank/main@1 | zfs receive -F backup/main


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## phoenix (Jun 4, 2009)

Yeah, that would work.


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