Craig Sanders wrote:
note: I have no idea if the above works if you have root on ZFS. I believe debian's grub package may support zfs but i've never really cared enough to find out. The above method definitely works for non-root filesystems.
(Correct me if I'm wrong, but) grub support only matters if /boot is on ZFS. If /boot is (say) ext2 and / is ZFS, then it should be fine providing the ramdisk supports ZFS.
I don't want to mess with that and the server in question will have an internal USB port that's ideal for booting such configurations. So I want to get a USB device with GRUB and an initramfs that starts ZFS for the root filesystem.
good plan.
Don't forget to backup the /boot onto the HDDs and/or a second USB key, though :-)
SSDs are down to about $1/GB now, about half what they were when i got the 120GB SSD for that server, so i'd probably use a 240GB today. or maybe two 120GBs.
Hm, not quite there yet (sans sales): $ msy | LC_ALL=C w3m -dump -T text/html | foldr egrep -- 2.5 [0-9]+G SSD SATA | sort -nk3 -t'|' |(NSW Auburn Clearance) Kingston (SV100S2/64GB) 2.5" 64GB SATA2 SSD HDD |50 | |Kingston SVP200S3/60G 60GB SSDNOW V+200 SATA3 2.5" SSD HDD |81 | |(NSW Auburn Clearance) Kingston (SV100S2/128GB) 2.5" 128GB SATA2 SSD |85 | |Patriot 2.5 60GB PYRO Sanforce-SF-2281 2.5 inch SATA3 SSD Solid |85 | |Kingston SVP200S3/120G 120GB SSDNOW V+200 SATA3 2.5" SSD HDD |109 | |Patriot 2.5 120GB PYRO Sanforce-SF-2281 2.5 inch SATA3 SSD Solid |129 | |Kingston 2.5 inch 120GB HyperX SATA3 SSD Solid State Drive SH100S3/ |145 | |Patriot 2.5 120GB Wildfire Sanforce-SF-2281 2.5 inch SATA3 SSD |195 | |OCZ Agility4 256GB SATA3 SSD AGT4-25SAT3-256G |265 |