Well, if my RAID truly is dead and I can't recover any of the data on it 
(which it's looking like right now) then there's really no problem with me 
trashig that thing and letting ZFS take over.

I have 8 disks in there. What I assumed RAID5 would do with that was 6+2, 
which is fine by me. If ZFS can give me the same result as a RAID5 array 
can (as in, a continuous 18TB filesystem with 6TB for parity, or whatever) 
I'm totally fine with that. I will have to read up on ZFS, which I 
should've done ages ago anyway.


On Wed, 6 Nov 2013, Andrew Berg wrote:

> On 2013.11.06 11:28, tclug at freakzilla.com wrote:
>> Yeah, I'm worried especially about stability on Linux, since I'm not
>> rebuilding this entire server (:
>>
>> This is software RAID5 - can ZFS just take over from that? I've not done a
>> ton with it.
> Depends on what you mean by take over. You can have an arbitrary number of data disks with an arbitrary number of parity disks (though using
> 2, 4, or 8 data disks is more efficient than other configurations), so yes, you can easily do 4+1 with ZFS.
> If you mean have some kind of RAID setup already that you want to put ZFS on top of, that's a bad idea and you should let ZFS' zpool
> functionality handle that. You shouldn't (and in some cases can't) use other volume management or RAID systems underneath ZFS, since it can
> lead to ZFS making poor decisions based on incorrect information about the disks.
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