More ZFS Goodness
My big ZFS pool on my SageTV server recently hit 2/3 capacity. It’s amazing just how big HD shows are, and I record a lot of them (probably too many). I needed to do something before I ran out of space, so I ordered 4 more 2TB Hitachi drives. This box doesn’t have hot-swap capability, but if it had I think I could have done this with 1 reboot. So, I pulled out 2 of the 1TB drives from separate mirrored pairs and replaced them with 2 2TB drives. Then I ran ‘zfs replace’ for each missing drive and in about 3 hours it was done resilvering. I did this again for the other 2 1TB drives from those 2 mirrored pairs. A reboot later and my array now shows 5.44TB capacity. It appears throughput has increased as well. So, this is my 3rd capacity expansion on this pool and I think ZFS is indispensable for it. There’s no doubt that 6 hours of resilvering better than having to find some place to back up everything (if I even have that much space anywhere), backing it up, rebuilding the array, and then restoring.
