Infrastructure Software

Hello,

I am building a solaris 10 X86 public/anonymous ftp server and have a twelve bay sata array enclosure, and twelve 1TB disks to connect to a X2250. The server will be replicated via rsync to a backup server, so I was thinking raidz1 is sufficient zpool redundancy on the servers. Using the "power of two plus parity" best practice for raidz pools, my choices are:

one raidz1 vdev with 10 disks and two hot spares

two raidz1 vdevs, one with 9 disks the other with 3 disks


Using the ten disk vdev with two hot spares does not seem to be an efficient use of the drives (the two hot spares). Using the nine disk and three disk vdevs uses up all the disks, but leaves the system without a hot spare for automatic fail over in the case of a drive fault.


I could ignore the "power of two plus parity" best practice, and setup the pool with:

two raidz1 vdevs, one with five disks the other with six disks, and one hot spare




Comments on the pro's and cons of the listed raidz1 vdev configurations listed above given the twelve bay array, or suggestions on better zpool configurations not listed are appreciated.


Thanks,