Re: Two 'enterprise' grade disks or three 'consumer' grade disks?

In article <4ae0cb89@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Dave <foo@xxxxxxx> writes:

My intension on the Ultra 27 was to create a single pool from a pair of 2 TB
mirrored disks. Do you not think that is a good idea?

I've bought the Ultra 27, which I should get next Wednesday, with a single 500
GB SATA disk (the smallest Sun do), so could potentially add another of those to
make a separate smaller root pool.

My intension was to pretty much not bother using that disk, just leaving Solaris
10 on it, and sticking it in the cupboard. I was then intending to install the
latest OpenSolaris on the two 2 TB disks.

My home system has a 256GB disk which is the root filesystem.
It's still a UFS root with about 5 LU boot environments,
mainly because it was originally setup 3 years ago.
This disk also has swap and a large filesystem /local/tmp
which is basically a long term unbackedup tmp area to
create CD/DVD images, etc.

My data all resides on a pair of 1TB ZFS mirrors (Ultrastars).
These started off as 256GB drives almost 3 years ago, and
were upgraded through 512GB and now to 1TB just by attaching
the new disk to zpool mirror and pulling the old disk out, all
completely seamless to the data.

A 4th SATA connection goes to a hot swap caddyless SATA bay
similar to this one
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Trayless-Mobile-Rack-Drive-Interface/dp/B000FSBVNC
which I use for archiving.

Of course the downside of adding another 500 GB disk, is that would leave no
room for future expansion, as the Ultra 27 only has 4 slots for disks.

Each time I've needed to expand, hard disk prices have halved,
or rather, capacity is doubled for the same price, so I just
upgrade the two sides of the mirror for bigger disks.
I don't want to end up with a large sprawl of what rapidly
become tiny obsolete drives over time, needlessly consuming
power. The 256GB and 512GB drives I've removed get used as
offline backups.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]
.

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