I saw some mention of N+P and block/stripe sizes in regards to ZFS while searching for other info. Right now my plan was to use all 11 2TB drives I have in a large RAIDz2 pool and keep a 3TB drive I have as a hot spare or just as a spare if needed. If I'm going to seriously gimp the system building it with 11 drives I can either go ahead and stuff the 3TB in and make it 12 disks, or rebuild the pool with 10 drives and shunt one of them off as a hot-spare. Personally I'd rather keep all the space I can keep since ZFS doesn't like to grow large parity pools. I guess I could also just turn all 11 disks into a RAIDz3 pool as well.
How much performance impact are we talking about if I use 11 drives in a RAIDz2?
If it matters I do prefer better performance if I can get it, but its not a primary goal for this pool, this pool is more an archive then constant active data though I do have 10Gb connectivity for everything so I'm not bottlenecked with 1GbE.
Also, i have a mix of 512b and 4k drives in the pool (and 7200RPM and 5400RPM). Am I better off setting the whole pool to ashift=12 to accomodate the 4k drives or just leave it at ashift=9 (which is what it picked when I created the pool in napp-it)?
I know mixing the 7200 and 5400 will limit the 7200 drives but I don't care, I don't have the cash to replace them and don't really want to sell them and buy 5400s to replace them (since only 2 of them are 7200rpm).
How much performance impact are we talking about if I use 11 drives in a RAIDz2?
If it matters I do prefer better performance if I can get it, but its not a primary goal for this pool, this pool is more an archive then constant active data though I do have 10Gb connectivity for everything so I'm not bottlenecked with 1GbE.
Also, i have a mix of 512b and 4k drives in the pool (and 7200RPM and 5400RPM). Am I better off setting the whole pool to ashift=12 to accomodate the 4k drives or just leave it at ashift=9 (which is what it picked when I created the pool in napp-it)?
I know mixing the 7200 and 5400 will limit the 7200 drives but I don't care, I don't have the cash to replace them and don't really want to sell them and buy 5400s to replace them (since only 2 of them are 7200rpm).