# ZFS for Removable Bk (single drive(s))



## ServerStorm (Aug 13, 2010)

Hi,

I am experienced with Linux, however this is my first foray into FreeBSD.

I have a customer that needs reliable business file serving and data backup. The decision , after research, was made to use FreeBSD, FreeNAS, and Remote Backup PC. My customer also wants to take one drive home nightly. 

The server has a hot swappable backplane and a total of 4 drive slots. Three of the drives are formated in UTF and have a RAID 5. The final drive I also formated as UTF but did not make it part of the RAID or part of the O.S. install.

The fourth drive was origninally formated and managed by FreeNAS. However problems happen when I pull the hot swappable 4th drive. The FreeNAS or FreeBSD tries to resync the drives. As the drives are each 2 Terra-bytes they take 2 days to resync. Obviously this is not the intended behavior for a hot swappable drive. When reading further I found documentation that stated that FreeNAS does not support hot swapping. 

The thought now is to remove the 4th drive from FreeNAS management and allow FreeNAS to mount the 4th drive. This, plus a 5th drive would be formatted under ZFS and each day the 4th drive would be swapped at the end of the day and replaced with the 5th drive. The next day the 4th drive would come back and swap with the 5th drive.

Is ZFS the best format to do the aforementioned functionality? I have read a lot about ZFS and it seems to be well suited for this (even though it is a single drive)? Your thoughts on the best way to allow the hot swappable removable drive to function.

It would also be ideal if the removable (swappable) drive would not first need to be unmounted and could be simple removed with the next drive fulfilling the degraded zpool?

Again being green with FreeBDS I don't know if this is going on the right track or barking up the wrong tree?

Your thoughts, help, solutions  are appreciated.

Truly,
Steve


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## ServerStorm (Aug 13, 2010)

The 5th paragraph should read 





> The thought now is to remove the 4th drive from FreeNAS management and allow FreeBSD to manage and mount the 4th drive.



Sorry I am tired when writing this


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