Different sized mirrored vdevs in the same zpool?

OpenZFS
1

This last year, I built my first proper media server. To store the data, I am using 2 12 TB HDDs in a mirrored vdev. On black friday, I pincked up two 20 TB HDDs for a fair price. My thinking was that I would add another vdev with the 20 TB HDDs to the same zpool, to expand my storage to a total of 32 TB.

Is this a reasonable thing to do, or is there some reason why I should use only drives of the same size within one zpool?

2

Perfectly reasonable.

edit: if this was intended to be some screaming demon of a VM host, high performance database, or whatever, I’d have a more nuanced answer.

But this is a media server running on rust, and you’re asking for more space, not more performance. You’ll still get more performance, mind you; just not the ideal maximal possible performance of four drives in two wide mirror configuration.

There will be no meaningful performance difference in your context. :+1::beer_mug:

4 Likes
3

Thank you, I’ll proceed as planned then! :smile:

1 Like