Yeah, I've been reading up. I'm probably doing a raidz2 on the thing.

My "old" RAID5 should be done rebuilding in about an hour, I'll try some 
recovery tricks after that. Even if it works, I'm making a raidz2 out of 
the new drives, moving everything over and then adding the old drives to 
the new raidz2.

On Wed, 6 Nov 2013, Thomas Lunde wrote:

>
>
>> On Nov 6, 2013, at 11:43 AM, tclug at freakzilla.com wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> 18T is no problem for ZFS. It sounds like you have 3T disks in RAID5 + a hot spare. With such large disks, that's a really bad idea because you have very high odds of hitting an error while trying to rebuild your array.  Here's one semi-technical explanation :
> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162
>
> RAID6 or, better, raidz2 would be a good idea -- even better than RAID10 for data security:
> http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2151343
>
> ZFS' scrubbing, checksums, snapshots, etc. have won me over.
>
>
> Thomas
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