Writing files directly in zpool

Question

We're on freebsd 8, and i created a zpool of 3 drives.

# zpool create mypool da1 da2 da3

Now my question is, can i begin saving files to this?.. we´re talking 1TB of pictures (photography).

Or is it required and or safest to create a zfs on it first.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 14 '10 at 10:16

0

Give a look at /mypool. It should be already mounted, if it works like in Solaris.

answered May 14 '10 at 10:16

PiL

1,599
8
6

Yes, i realize that it is allready mounted :) But is zpool designed for this kind of datastorage or is it required that a zfs i set upon it? Yes i'm new to the ZFS world, initially we made a RAIDZ ZFS in the zpool. But were not to stoked about the less amount of diskspace. The 3 disk is allready 3 pairs of 2x1TB in Raid1 arrays. – Phliplip May 14 '10 at 10:51
Normally when you use zfs you don't need to use a hardware raid. In zfs world the volume manager and file system are integrated, not for example like lvm and ext3 on linux. So if you create a zfs pool this pool is already available, whitout specifically create a file system on it. From there /mypool you can then create and manage other filesystems with zfs(1M). If you want you can specifically say at the pool creation to not mount it automatically with the -m none option. – PiL May 14 '10 at 12:08
Thank you for your answers :) We're running the FreeBSD as a virtualmachine on an VMware ESX, thus the hardware raid. – Phliplip May 14 '10 at 22:12
If you want to test a bit zfs i suggest you to run a opensolaris instance. Zfs is more complete and integrated in the system, give it a try. – PiL May 15 '10 at 06:43

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 20 '10 at 22:55

A zpool is also a zfs filesystem, so you can, yes, write files to it. You can also create snapshots of it, etc. I'd generally recommend not doing so simply because you have more flexibility if you create a zfs filesystem inside it -- you can then create others later, assign quotas, etc etc.

Nothing will break, though.

And yes, if you have hardware RAID already you don't need to do software RAID inside ZFS. RAIDZ is more efficient than most previous software RAID5 etc., but it's still (a) slower than hardware RAID most of the time, and (b) unnecessary to duplicate.

Writing files directly in zpool

2 Answers2