Configuring ZFS

As mentioned earlier, our installation has just one hard drive. Let’s suppose that we need to add six more hard drives to our system.

Now, let us assume that we have finished adding the six hard drives. But since none of them is partitioned, they are currently unusable.

This is where the benefits of ZFS come in, freeing us from the burden of creating partitions (although we have the liberty of creating these, if we want to).

Let’s now create a storage pool using two of our hard drives: three drives and uses striping to divide data across all the hard drives, with additional parity data divided across all disks. If one of the hard drives dies, you won’t lose any of your data. RAID 5 offers data redundancy with a lower storage cost than RAID 1). RAID Z voids the ‘write hole’ by using copy-on-write. If a single disk in your pool dies, simply replace that disk, and ZFS will automatically rebuild the data based on parity information from the other disks. To lose all the information in your storage pool, two disks would have to die. To make things even more redundant, you can use RAID 6 (RAID-Z2 in the case of ZFS) and have double parity.

To achieve the above, run the following command: