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I have a machine with 3 2TB SSD drives, I want to configure openzfs at least on two of them. The root partition has ext4 and if possible I would like to avoid reinstalling everything, so I am wondering if it makes sense to create a large file in root ext4 partition, and mount it as virtual block device strictly for parity storage.

Is the above configuration possible? or would be preferrable to take the extra-effort to resize the root partition and create another dedicated zfs partition from the main SSD?

lurscher
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1 Answers1

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Generally speaking, ZFS behaves best when it's allowed to take full control of its block devices. I strongly recommend running two of your drives as a ZFS mirror instead, if you want to avoid the potential complications of running root-on-ZFS, or even purchasing a fourth SSD if you insist on wanting to run RAIDZ1 with a separate boot volume.

It would be possible to partition (at least) one of the drives and dedicate one partition to ZFS for a RAIDZ1 setup, but you would lose some space doing so (the space available for data + parity information would be 3 times the smallest disk in the set), and it would net you worse performance than running on the entire disks.

I would strongly recommend against using a file on a disk as one of the members in a RAIDZ1 set. It's fine for learning the ropes, but it will bite you once you take your training wheels off.

Mikael H
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