ZFS Questions

[shovenose]

Who be using this I hate hardware RAID. Every experience I've ever had with it was a disaster. Software RAID has served me well in every flavor I've ever tried. mdadm, MS Storage Spaces, StableBit DrivePool, Intel fakeraid, etc. So, for my "new" VM server at home, running Proxmox, I decided to go for ZFS.

I'm going to be running 6x 120GB SSDs in a RAIDZ1 (basically RAID5), well really 5 drives with one hot spare.

I have a 1TB Crucial MX500 as the system drive. All my VMs are going to be on the ZFS array.

I've done a lot of research but perhaps I'm a dumb dumb or it's because I'm using Bing (hey, free Starbucks gift cards) but I can't find an answer... ZFS can be exported and imported to another system no problem. BUT one has to run the export command first. What if my system drive dies? I can't export the pool if it no boot!

Also, what do I pick as ashift value? The SSDs I'm using for the ZFS array are rather old, they are Kingston SSDnow V300 120GB, which report to linux a block size both logical and physical of 512 bytes. Pretty sure this is a fake reported number and the SSD actually does its own thing. So do I go for 9, 12, or 13?

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: ZFS Questions

The SSDs I'm using for the ZFS array are rather old, they are Kingston SSDnow V300 120GB, which report to linux a block size both logical and physical of 512 bytes. Pretty sure this is a fake reported number and the SSD actually does its own thing.

512 bytes is the legacy sector format. Thus, SSDs most likely have 1024-byte (1 KB) sectors, if not 4 KB.