I’ve upgraded my home storage server with a new power supply and a new case. These have addressed my two largest problems with my initial build – the ease of getting drives in and out of the case, and the ability to keep all the drives spinning, all the time. That last one shouldn’t have been an issue, but cheap capacitors and cheap molex connectors for the drives made my life interesting.

Additionally, I’ve gone a much more conservative route with the layout of the zpool, which I think makes perfect sense. More after the jump.

I had been using a raidz (or raidz1) pool – essentially a RAID5 setup in ZFS parlance. Between the old failmode=panic directive, and the flakey power supply, I wound up having to do a lot of work trying to recover my zpools. Additionally, it doesn’t make sense to make pools smaller than 4 disks – which means that you have to add disks in sets of 4. That is too high a cost burden for me to bear at the moment, so this time around, I setup the pool with 2 mirrored vdev’s. I’ve got one 750 GB SATA drive as a spare at the moment, ready and willing to take over for a disk that fails if that is needed. The plan is to get another 750 at some point, and then run the pool with 3 mirrored pairs. After that, all upgrades will be to larger capacity drives, which I can buy in pairs without too much pain. Then, it’s a simple zpool replace tank disk1 disk2… at least, that’s the plan.

We’ll see what happens.