Snowplow8861 , 9 months ago

zfs is excellent. It’s enterprise and designed to suit the whole “I’ve got 60 disks filling up a 4ru top loaded SAN. If we expand we have to buy another 60 disk expansion.” and because of that it works perfectly for expansion. You don’t make a single raidz holding 60 disks. You’d make them in groups of say 6 or 8 or 10. Whatever suits your needs for speeds and storage and resilience. When you expand you drop another while raidz into the pool. Maybe it’s another 6 disks into the new storage shelf.

But since your article in 2016, the openZFS project has promised us individual raidz expanding: In 2021 the announcement: arstechnica.com/…/raidz-expansion-code-lands-in-o…

In 2022 an update for feature design complete but no code: freebsdfoundation.org/…/raid-z-expansion-feature-…

The actual request is here: github.com/openzfs/zfs/pull/15022

And the last announcement update was in June 2033 in the leadership meeting recorded here: m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=2p32m-7…

You might think this is slow and yeah it’s snails pace. But it’s not from lack of work it’s really truely because it’s part of the entire strategy of making sure zfs and every update and every feature is just as robust.

I’m a fan even having hardware fail and disks fail both in enterprise, and at home. Zfs import being so agnostic just pull in the pool doesn’t matter if it was BSD or Linux.