I have been working to make some fundamental changes to the DoogieLabs site and server. It was recommended to be by a friend to check out ZFS, he said I had no idea what I was missing. He was very right indeed, and after some research I uncovered something additional. No standard RAID 5 is actually reliable, especially the metadb version that I was using with ufs. CLICK HERE for a detailed explaination on this.
So after formatting another disk ZFS and trying a couple of things out, I felt that I was ready to give it a go. I copied all the data from my RAID to a single backup disk, and then wiped the entire RAID array and reformatted ZFS. This is 10x 146Gb disks, and since I formatted using raidz2 I am able to sustain a double failure without sacrificing data integrity. The only caveat was it cost a little bit of space, limiting to a singe terrabyte across the array instead of 1.2 with the old metadb / ufs setup. (I only complain because my RAID is full.)
There is a major benefit that I will be looking forward to however, and that is a neat little trick to increase the size of my RAID as I am able to find and afford the disks.
As outlined above it’s possible to actually increase the size by swapping a larger disk in the existing disk slot. Very awesome!
The above drive is one crazy good deal! Hopefully over time I am able to find 10 of them for a price like that and end up with 3.5 or so TB of storage over time.