# general zfs question



## Sylhouette (Jan 5, 2009)

1) If i create a zfs pool with say with 4 hd's of 160 GB's and one fails can i replace that drive with a bigger one?

2) can i add extra drives to the pool.
Say i have 4 drive's of 160 GB can i add a 250 GB or a drive of the same size later on.

3) can i replace all drives later on with new drives with a greater  capacatie.
Say i have 4 drives of 160 GB can i do a zpool offline storage ad1
replace ad1 with a 250 GB or larger and do a  zpool replace storage ad1, and that for ad2, 3 and so on.

Thanks for your time

regards,
Johan Hendriks


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## danger@ (Jan 5, 2009)

http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/zfsadmin.pdf

Somewhere around page 98 is information related to your interests...


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## gilinko (Jan 5, 2009)

1) No problem, the "redundant" way using ZFS is to create a raidz1 group(one redundant) or raidz2(two redundant) drives, and as usual with raid you have to replace a drive with another drive of equal size or larger.

2) Yes. You can add extra drives to the pool, BUT you can't add extra drives to a raidz[1|2] group. So a raidz1 group with 4 drives can't be extended with more drives.

3) You can add as many drives as you want to the pool, but "replacing" a raidz group can only be done by creating a new raidz group with the new drives before taking the old one off-line/removing the drives.


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## hedwards (Jan 6, 2009)

You can replace a drive with a larger one, just the extra capacity wouldn't be available. It's mostly useful for times when you want to enlarge the capacity.

Meaning you could throw in a 250gb drive in place of a 160gb one and have that resilver then continue on to the other ones.


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## Sylhouette (Jan 9, 2009)

Thanks all for the answers.
I will read the documentation provided by danger@

But first need to understand the disk numbering of solaris 

Thanks for your time.

regards,
Johan


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