sean's place

A Free Day

My morning routine on the weekend usually consists of: wake up, brew coffee, drink said coffee (possibly watch a little TV), then go about my day. Indeed, today followed this pattern — that is, until I realized that I had nothing to do today¹!

That means it’s time to play around in the technology playground and maybe learn a thing or two in the process. Today’s project: ZFS.

I usually like to pick projects that solve a problem I’m having (even if that problem isn’t particularly grave). In this case, I have about 4TB of storage split across 7 drives of various sizes (and for the moment, split between 2 machines). I’ve arranged the partitions in a way that meets my current needs, but it’s hardly flexible. If I need to reallocate storage, I have to do play musical chairs with my data in order to refactor the layout.

Ideally, I could map all the storage into a large pool and allocate shares dynamically among my various needs: media store, backups, Time Machine, and regular data. I’d like the shares to have different properties, e.g; I don’t care about access times on my media store (noatime). If one share needs more, I’d like to be able to allocate it extra storage from offsets elsewhere. I’m hoping ZFS gets me at least part of the way there.

To start with, I’m playing musical chairs with about 200GB of data. I’m copying 200GB off two 500GB drives (arranged in a mirror) over the wire to my file server (boy, am I glad NFS is easy to setup). Once I’m done, I’ll have 1 TB of free storage (2x500GB) to setup in a testbed ZFS pool (just as soon as I extract the drives from avifors and re-mount them in protego!)

I love geek days.

1 – except my run, of course…