It's time to replace hard drives again, and I'm thinking about ZFS....

[bmfrosty]

I've been (fairly passively) using unraid for about a decade, and my oldest drives (3/5 in my array) have hit the 5 year mark, and I'm thinking that it's time to replace them.  In the process, I'm considering moving to a ZFS pool.

 

My current setup includes a 2-drive SSD Cache using BTRFS and a 5 drive array using XFS on the drives with 1 parity drive.

 

My goals are to increase storage and improve failure tolerance and reduce the occurrences of having to use unbalance to shift around files to make space.

 

My current thoughts are to build a 5-drive RAIDZ2 ZFS pool to take place of my array (mostly) which should bring my usable space in the pool to ~56TB vs the usable space of my array of ~44TB.  I'll keep the two newest disks in the array as still an array, and will keep (usually newer) frequently accessed files there.  ZFS pool will keep lighter touch files.

 

I guess my questions are - Does what I'm thinking about here make sense?  When not being actively access for a time will the drives in the ZFS pool spin down?  What might I not have thought about yet that I may need to think about?