Question re ZFS with mixed drive speeds & types

[Shane Ambler]

On 5/8/20 4:25 pm, Greg Marsh wrote:
> Hello everyone. I hope you are well.
> 
> I’m budgeting to upgrading my home file server. Sort of for more
> data capacity, but mostly for more physical space, flexibility and to
> try some things storage wise.
> I ask because about 10 years ago, I was involved in a project that
> had a HUGE storage component. Many of the vendors we brought in to
> pitch, including Sun, were promoting tiered storage. Sun in
> particular were quite proud of this tech. Their system ran ZFS and
> had a hybrid of ssd, sas & SATA, with the system dynamically moving
> data around the different speed/capacity drives, based on their
> activity, all transparent to the application or user.

ZFS can use ssd drives for a zpool cache, keeping used files on the
faster disks, but I don't believe ZFS (or any disk based FS) offers any
automatic load balancing between disk types.

For automatic load balancing I would expect the use of a distributed
file system, like glusterFS or cephFS


-- 
FreeBSD - the place to B...Sharing Disks

Shane Ambler