[LUNA] FreeBSD ZFS 'RAID0' setup ....

[William A. Mahaffey III]

.... I am provisioning a new box to replace this one (an aging 55W 
AMD64X2 3800+, 2 GB RAM, 1X 40 GB SATA-1 root drive, 1X 160 GB SATA-1 
mounting /home, running Fedora-14 64-bit, to be re-purposed into a 
m0n0wall box). I never upgraded cuz I liked the look & feel of F14 & 
felt no urge to move. Now the machine feels *SLOW* (FireFox takes 25-30 
sec. to launch, similar for T-bird). New box is AMD 25W quad-core Jaguar 
based, Sempron 3850, 16 GB of RAM, 4X 2.5" 1 TB 7200 rpm SATA-3 HGST's, 
to be partitioned & ZFS-RAID-ed & run FreeBSD 9.2 64-bit, I have been 
reading feverishly on ZFS & FreeBSD, like everything I have found so 
far, however 1 question. Given only 4 drives, I don't want to RAID-1 
(mirror) or RAIDZ-n (RAID-5/6-ish), & lose 25-50 % of possible storage. 
The machine will be rsynced nightly (at least) & tar-bziped twice 
weekly, & w/ all new 2.5" drives, good cooling, etc. I don't expect 
trouble, & will be well prepped if it rears its ugly head. Thus I would 
like to RAID-0 (stripe) the 4 ZFS partitions. I located several very 
detailed tutorials, notably 
https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot/9.0-RELEASE, which walk 
you through everything in gory detail, except for that 1 question. is it 
possible to just stripe ZFS partitions ? I thought I remembered reading 
that somewhere, but failed to bookmark it & haven't been able to 
re-acquire it .... Any help appreciated ....

-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

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