These two videos show a small amount of the ZFS abilities in action. What you're looking at here are the commands and action as three 4gig memory sticks are used to create a RAID set, are pulled in, out, exported and imported ... the export and import can be on a completely different machine; a completely different operating system ... as long as it supports ZFS, it will read the set.

The second video shows the 4gig units being replaced with 8 gig units in turn and at the end of it, the set was exported and imported and then benefited from the extra space. This test, by the way, is being done on a 4 year old laptop with 1gig of RAM, so I know that Open Solaris will work on the incoming FitPCII without extra RAM. I'd love it to HAVE extra ram, or the ability to upgrade later, but I think it is soldered on board. More about that later, however.



The real magic here is that this kind of thing used to require dedicated, expensive hardware; and even then, a fault tollerant set couldn't be easily moved from one machine to another. Not only that, but finding a faulty device and replacing it could be a complete pain. The cheaper RAID cards I have encountered were a nightmare when it came to trying to talk with them to repair damage.

This, is nothing short of a bit of magic. No formatting, no fdisking, no nothing. Just put the devices in to the pool and away it goes.

We'll discuss some of the other benefits of ZFS and also some of the RAID strategies, in another post.

If I wanted to do this without the grief of getting knee deep in another OS and hardware, then I'd be looking at the DROBO but I'd be asking some questions about available storage, etc. before I invested the best part of £400 in a unit that doesn't even come with any disks.