ZFS questions

[Chuck Burns]

On Wed, 08 Aug 2012 10:05:10 +0200
"Ronald Klop" <ronald-freebsd8 at klop.yi.org> wrote:

> > I'm slowly accumulating the drives over time for both budgetary reasons
> > and to also try to reduce the chances of multiple near-simultaneous
> > failures of drives from the same manufacturing batch.  I'd like to get
> > the array up and running before I have all the drives, but unfortunately
> > ZFS doesn't allow new drives to be added to an existing raidz vdev to
> > increase its capacity.  I do have some smaller drives and I was thinking
> > about pairing those up with gconcat or gstripe and configuring the ZFS
> > pool with the concatenated/striped pairs.  I know this isn't
> > recommended, but it seems to me like zpool create would accept this.
> > What concerns me is happens on reboot when ZFS goes searching for all of
> > the components of its pool.  Will it stumble across its metadata on the
> > first of the two concatenated pairs and try to add that individual drive
> > to the pool instead of the pair?
> 
> I don't know. Somebody else might answer this.
> 
> Ronald.
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Wouldn't it work to just use 1 new, large drive, along with the rest of the smaller drives,  simply replacing them with the large drives as you get them?  the -size- of the vdevs can change.. and from my limited testing, it seems you can upgrade space, not by adding more drives, but by replacing existing drives in the vdev with larger ones, then resilvering.. 

-- 
Chuck Burns <break19 at gmail.com>