partitioning server with 2 hard drives

[RW]

On Wed, 16 Sep 2020 06:54:32 +0100
Steve O'Hara-Smith wrote:

> On Tue, 15 Sep 2020 16:10:05 -0700
> Michael Sierchio <kudzu at tenebras.com> wrote:

> > When, not if, a drive fails, will you find one with precisely the
> > same geometry / capacity to replace the failed drive and remirror?
> > Can you do  
> 
> 	You don't need to, you just need one big enough, and 1TB
> drives are very easy to find.

Just out of curiosity, does ZFS leave a small amount of space unused on
a raw drive to allow for a replacement being very slightly smaller?  

 
> > so before the other drive fails (which might be statistically
> > likely)?  
> 
> 	Unless you do something daft like RMA the drive and wait then
> yes IME.

In the early days of Fastmail they had a major outage where at least 3
drives failed. IIRC the other failures occurred while the RAID array was
being rebuilt after the first failure. The drives were identical in
every way, and I guess the the stress of a rebuild can play a part in
synchronising failures.