datahoarder
Who are we?
We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.
-- 5-4-3-2-1-bang from this thread
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Yes very much so. You'll need to figure out what your strategy is for array growth before you start building, because ZFS is very inflexible when growing. I normally just use mirrors because you can add 2 disks at a time with no hassles or gotchas. If you use a RAIDZ variant you will basically have to destruct and rebuild the pool/vdev if you want to grow them (or buy a whole bunch of new disks to start a separate RAIDZ array). The only other option is to replace every single disk in the RAIDZ with a larger capacity, which also works. RAIDZ expansion as a feature has been promised for many years (and the code is even already written!) but so far it has not been mainlined and although the current plan is to expect it sometime in the next year or so, that has also been the plan for the past 3-5 years. If you want to count on this feature being implemented by the time you want to grow you can feel free to do so, but it's not something I would count on until it's there.