On Sat, Jun 22, 2013 at 8:49 AM, B Vance <anonymous.pseudonym...@gmail.com> wrote: > Main advantage of using ZFS on linux is the ease of growing your pools. > As long as you know the id of the drive (preferably the hardware id not > the delegated one), its so simple I can manage it. Since I'm nowhere > near the technical level of most folk here, anyone can do it. For what > it's worth (very little I know), I think that ZFS has too many > advantages over linux software RAID for it to be a real competition.
I'm holding out for btrfs but for all the same reasons. I really don't want to mess with zfs on linux (fuse, etc - and the license issues - the thing I don't get is that Oracle maintains both). However, the last time I checked ZFS does not support reshaping of RAID-Z. That is a major limitation for me, as I almost always expand arrays gradually. You can add additional raid-z's to a zpool, but if you have a raid-z with 5 drives you can't add 1 more drive to it as part of the same raid-z. That means that it get treated as a mirror and not a stripe, and that means that if you add 10 drives in this manner one at a time you get 5 drives of capacity and not 9. Btrfs targets making raids re-shapeable, just like mdadm. But in general COW makes a LOT more sense with RAID because the layer-breaking allows them to often avoid read-write cycles by writing complete stripes more often, and files aren't modified in place so you can consolidate changes for many files into a single stripe (granted, that can cause fragmentation). ZFS has all those advantages being COW, as will btrfs when it is ready for prime time. Rich
